21 May 2014, NYT: Changes to Surveillance Bill Stoke Anger
May 22, 2014
House Passes Restraints on Bulk Data Collection
By Jonathan Weisman and Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON -- In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement between the White House and Congress on a major national security issue, the House passed legislation on Thursday that aims to end the National Security Agency's bulk phone records program that had prompted intense domestic debate about privacy and civil liberties.
But there were limits to any idea of a new season of accord in the capital. A Senate panel voted to allow President Obama to create a plan to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to reduce military forces, even as the House passed a defense policy bill that would continue to bar the closing of the prison and resisted the administration's proposed reductions to Pentagon spending on personnel, weapons and benefits.
And while the Senate confirmed David J. Barron, Mr. Obama's choice for a federal appeals court vacancy in Boston, it did so solely with Democratic votes. Mr. Barron's nomination had been buffeted by controversy over his authorship of Justice Department memos about the targeted killing of an American citizen.
Before leaving town for the Memorial Day break, the House overwhelmingly passed the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which aims to restrict the government's ability to collect records about Americans in bulk. The bill was overhauled in negotiations with the administration [1] this week, and House leaders allowed no amendments, leaving some civil liberties groups to say that efforts at change had been weakened.
The Republican-controlled House then approved this year's version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Both bills are heading to the Democratic-controlled Senate, where the Armed Services Committee voted 25-to-1 on its own version of the authorization act in the early afternoon.
The Senate bill, unlike the House version, makes some of the tough budget choices pushed by the White House to cope with the stringent spending caps already adopted by Congress: smaller pay raises, lower housing benefits, higher co-payments on pharmaceuticals, and weapons-systems cuts for Navy cruisers, Army helicopters and Air Force surveillance programs.
The Senate bill includes a plan to allow the Guantánamo military prison to be closed, something Mr. Obama has pushed. The legislation would permit the closing once the president provided Congress with a plan that worked through both security and legal issues related to any transfer of the remaining detainees to United States soil, said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Levin called the provision "a path to close Guantánamo." Congress could vote to disallow the plan, but the president could veto that disapproval, effectively meaning opponents would have to muster a two-thirds majority to override the veto and keep the prison open.
"You are seeing a willingness to try to get more buy-in, for lack of a better word," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, referring to the administration's more collaborative approach.
However, it was not clear the provision would survive the legislative process, which will eventually include a reconciling of the Senate and House versions of the bill. Last year, the Senate panel tried to ease a statutory ban on bringing Guantánamo detainees to a prison on domestic soil, but the proposed change eventually fell away.
Still, the House's 303-to-121 vote on the U.S.A. Freedom Act sent a signal that both parties were no longer comfortable with giving the N.S.A. unfettered power to collect records in bulk about Americans.
The bill "really stands out to me as a very unusual example of Congress grappling with a very difficult policy issue, in which people have very strongly held views, and in which we managed to get to a very responsible compromise," said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California. "That is a rare animal these days."
A year ago, a divided House nearly voted to strip all funds from the N.S.A. for its bulk phone records program after leaks about its existence, but it fell short of a majority. This time, there was overwhelming support for the change.
"People are a lot more comfortable with a government that is not storing all this metadata," said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. "On this issue, the administration, their position and the position of House Republicans frankly was pretty close," he added.
Administration officials, led by Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the director of national intelligence, negotiated a flurry of last-minute alterations with lawmakers, focusing on a change to how the bill purports to stop the government from collecting records about Americans in bulk for national security investigations. The bill requires requests for records to be tied to a "specific selection term."
Under a previous version of the legislation, which both committees had unanimously passed and which had the backing of a coalition of privacy and industry groups, that phrase was defined as "a term used to uniquely describe a person, entity or account."
But Obama administration officials, according to congressional aides, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation worried that the definition would inadvertently block it from obtaining records for conventional investigations such as obtaining records of all lodgers at a hotel when it did not know the name of its suspect yet. They persuaded lawmakers to change the definition of "specific selection term" to something that would "limit the scope" of the request in an undefined way.
The Obama administration insisted that the change was not intended to weaken the restrictions on bulk collection. But industry and civil liberties groups dropped their support and urged the Senate to strengthen the bill.
Advocates pleaded for patience. Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is a critic of N.S.A. surveillance, said the bill was the first time since passage of the 1978 law creating the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Congress had actually rolled back significant parts of the government surveillance apparatus.
Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, said the bill's authors were "not able to close the door, lock it and throw away the key."
"The N.S.A. might still be watching us," he added, "but now we can be watching them."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/us/politics/changes-to-surveillance-bill-stoke-anger.html