7 May 2014, NYT: Rival House Bills Aim to Rein In N.S.A. Phone Data Program
May 8, 2014
House Panel Advances Bill on N.S.A. Collection of Phone Data
By Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON -- The House Intelligence Committee unanimously passed a bill on Thursday to replace the National Security Agency's program [1] that is systematically collecting bulk records about Americans' phone calls.
The panel decided to abandon its own version of legislation to replace the program and instead embrace a bill [2] developed by the House Judiciary Committee, which passed its measure, called the USA Freedom Act, unanimously on Wednesday. [3]
The two committees share jurisdiction over surveillance matters and had been seen as rivals, with the Intelligence Committee more concerned about preserving expansive surveillance powers and the Judiciary Committee more focused on imposing privacy protections.
But a single N.S.A. reform bill now moves to the floor of the House of Representatives with unanimous and bipartisan backing from both committees with jurisdiction over the matter, giving it added momentum. President Obama has already embraced its rough outlines.
The bill would replace the N.S.A.'s bulk collection program with a new kind of order allowing the government to obtain from phone providers the calling records of a person suspected of ties to terrorism and of people up to two links removed from the caller. It does not impose any new mandate that the firms hold on to such records longer than they normally would.
The Intelligence Committee's bill, while similar, would have granted greater powers to the N.S.A., including by letting it obtain the records without prior judicial approval and by expanding its use from counterterrorism investigations, like the current N.S.A. program, to investigations involving weapons of mass destruction and espionage.
The bill contains other measures affecting N.S.A. surveillance, but the Judiciary Committee had weakened or removed other proposals before passing it on Wednesday. In a statement, the chairman and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, Democrat of Maryland, said those changes had made it similar enough to their version to be acceptable.
"Enhancing privacy and civil liberties while protecting the operational capability of a critical counterterrorism tool, not pride of authorship, has always been our first and last priority," the two said in a joint statement.
[3] http://judiciary.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=A43C8193-33F6-4D18-9540-0993DB56FDBC