Senate republicans block NSA overhaul
20 Nov 2014 5:35 AM IST
Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure fell two votes short of the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation, which sponsors named the USA Freedom Act.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
‘This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,’ McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the programme was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism.
But the vote only put off a fractious debate over security and personal liberties until next year. While a Republican-controlled Senate is less likely to go along with the kinds of changes that were in the bill, which would have ended the NSA’s ability to collect bulk phone call data, the debate could further expose rifts between the party’s interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings.
Under the bill, which grew out of the disclosures in June 2013 by Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, the NSA would have gotten out of the business of collecting
Americans’ phone records in bulk.
Instead, most of the records would have stayed in the hands of the phone companies. Analysts would still have been able to perform contact chaining, but they would be required to use a new kind of court order to swiftly obtain only those records that were linked, up to two layers away, to a suspect even when held by different phone companies.
The bill would not have required phone companies to hold on to the records any longer than they already do for normal business purposes, which in some cases is 18 months.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
‘This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,’ McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the programme was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism.
But the vote only put off a fractious debate over security and personal liberties until next year. While a Republican-controlled Senate is less likely to go along with the kinds of changes that were in the bill, which would have ended the NSA’s ability to collect bulk phone call data, the debate could further expose rifts between the party’s interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings.
Under the bill, which grew out of the disclosures in June 2013 by Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, the NSA would have gotten out of the business of collecting
Americans’ phone records in bulk.
Instead, most of the records would have stayed in the hands of the phone companies. Analysts would still have been able to perform contact chaining, but they would be required to use a new kind of court order to swiftly obtain only those records that were linked, up to two layers away, to a suspect even when held by different phone companies.
The bill would not have required phone companies to hold on to the records any longer than they already do for normal business purposes, which in some cases is 18 months.
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