Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.
After compromises in the House bill, the NSA’s critics are buckling down for a months-long fight in the Senate that they hope will lead to an end to government snooping on Americans.
“This is going to be the fight of the summer,” vowed Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.
If advocates are able to change the House bill’s language to prohibit NSA agents from collecting large quantities of data, “then that’s a win,” he added.
“The bill still is not ideal even with those changes, but that would be an improvement,” Rottman said.
The USA Freedom Act was introduced in both the House and Senate last autumn, after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s operations captured headlines around the globe.
Privacy advocates like the ACLU rallied around the bill as the way to rein in the spy agency and more than 150 lawmakers signed on as cosponsors in the House.
In recent weeks, though, advocates worried that it was being progressively watered down.
First, leaders on the House Judiciary Committee made changes in order to gain support from a broader cross-section of the chamber. Then, after it sailed through both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, additional changes were made behind closed doors that caused many privacy groups and tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple to drop their support.
When it passed the House 303-121 last week, fully half of the bill’s original cosponsors voted against it.
“We were of course very disappointed at the weakening of the bill,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. “Right now we really are turning our attention to the Senate to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Instead of entirely blocking the government’s ability to collect bulk amounts of data, critics said that the new bill could theoretically allow federal agents to gather information about an entire area code or region of the country.
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