23 May 2014, NYT: House Passes Restraints on Bulk Data Collection
Jun 20, 2014
House Votes to Curb N.S.A. Scrutiny of Americans' Communications
By Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives late on Thursday voted [1] to bar the National Security Agency from looking for Americans' communications without a warrant within a database of emails and phone calls it gathers while targeting foreigners, a technique critics have labeled a "backdoor search loophole."
By a 293-to-123 vote, the House approved the ban as an amendment [2] to the 2015 defense appropriations act. A version of the proposal had been a component in the original version of the USA Freedom Act, legislation the House passed last month [3] that was aimed at curbing N.S.A. spying, but it had been stripped out in negotiations among congressional leaders.
The proposal has drawn opposition from security agencies and still has a long way to go before it would become law. But the chief sponsors of the provision -- Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky -- celebrated the lopsided vote.
"There's no question Americans have become increasingly alarmed with the breadth of unwarranted government surveillance programs used to store and search their private data," they said in a joint statement. [4] "By adopting this amendment, Congress can take a sure step toward shutting the back door on mass surveillance."
The amendment would impose new restrictions on how the security agency may gain access to Americans' emails and phone calls it collects without a warrant under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. That law allows the N.S.A. to gather phone calls and emails of noncitizens abroad, without a warrant, from operators of the domestic telecommunications network like AT&T and Verizon and from American communications providers like Google and Yahoo.
The 2008 law, which legalized a form of the warrantless surveillance program the Bush administration secretly put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, enables the N.S.A. to gather up large amounts of Americans' communications as well if the Americans are communicating with or about a foreign target.
Under current procedures, the agency is then able to search its database for Americans' phone numbers or email addresses to pull any such communications without any permission from a court.
The government has argued that since the communications were lawfully obtained, no further warrant or court order should be necessary. It has not said how often it has performed such searches.
The amendment also barred the N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency from using funds in the bill to "request or mandate" that an American corporation alter a product to permit surveillance of it.
In an interview on Friday, Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who sits on the intelligence committee, said he had voted against the amendment even though he supported the sentiment behind it because he thought it was too crudely written.
Among other flaws, he said, it contained no exception for searches of already-collected communications in a time-sensitive emergency. He also said the bar on even requesting that a product be altered to permit surveillance went beyond preventing back doors in services used by many people and would also preclude one-off alterations of specific units as part of an intelligence operation.
Also on Friday, the Obama administration announced [5] that it had obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court another 90-day extension, to Sept. 12, of the N.S.A. program that is systematically collecting bulk logs of Americans' phone calls. That program would be overhauled and replaced if Congress enacts the USA Freedom Act.
[1] http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll327.xml
[2] http://repcloakroom.house.gov/uploadedfiles/massie.pdf
[4] http://massie.house.gov/press-release/house-debate-amendment-curb-government-access-private-data
[5] http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/89391571133/joint-statement-from-the-office-of-the-director-of