The U.S. House of Representatives has dealt a body blow to the mass surveillance programmes of the National Security Agency by passing, by an overwhelming 338-88 margin, the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would put troves of telephonic metadata beyond the reach of government spies, on Wednesday.
In fact, the House had already passed a similar bill last year, and it failed to gain traction in the Senate, where Republicans do not appear to see eye to eye with their House colleagues and prefer to instead extend the controversial Patriot Act, the sweeping post-9/11 counterterrorism surveillance provision that is set to expire at the end of this month.
Under this Act and with what some have described as the “rubber-stamping” support of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, the NSA routinely collects vast amounts of communications data from the Internet and telephone system, including targets in India and other nations considered friends of the U.S.
The bill passed by the House does not limit the NSA’s power to collect telephonic metadata relating to foreigners, and only seeks to protect American citizens from the Agency’s dragnet or bulk surveillance.
The Obama White House, spurred on by pressure generated from the 2013 revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden, broadly supports reforms to the Agency’s programmes and has said that the President would sign the USA Freedom Act in its current form.
The House’s action on the Act is also significant for it comes close on the heels of the first decision from a court of appeals on the NSA’s mass telephone surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
Earlier this month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion in ACLU v. Clapper case, holding that the NSA’s telephone records programme went “exceeds the scope of what Congress authorised and therefore violates Section 215” of the Patriot Act.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S. civil liberties organisation, said, “The Senate is uniquely positioned to improve the civil liberties protections in the USA Freedom Act by adding additional transparency and oversight provisions, adding stronger limitations on the collection of data on innocent people, and throwing out some of the recently-added provisions to the bill that were included at the behest of the intelligence community.”
The Senate is expected to take up discussion of the USA Freedom Act in the coming weeks, and may vote on it by May 22.
