Senators Question the NSA

Senate Panel Presses N.S.A. on Phone Logs

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Senators of both parties on Wednesday sharply challenged the National Security Agency’s collection of records of all domestic phone calls, even as the latest leaked N.S.A. document provided new details on the way the agency monitors Web browsing around the world.

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At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the chairman, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, accused Obama administration officials of overstating the success of the domestic call log program. He said he had been shown a classified list of “terrorist events” detected through surveillance, and it did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted by the domestic program.

“If this program is not effective it has to end. So far, I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen,” Mr. Leahy said, citing the “massive privacy implications” of keeping records of every American’s domestic calls.

At the start of the hearing, the Obama administration released previously classified documents outlining the rules for how the domestic phone records may be accessed and used by intelligence analysts. And as senators debated the program, The Guardian published on its Web site a still-classified 32-page presentation, apparently downloaded by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that describes a separate surveillance activity by the agency.

Called the XKeyscore program, it apparently gives N.S.A. analysts access to virtually any Internet browsing activity around the world, data that is being vacuumed up from 150 foreign sites.

Together, the new disclosures provided additional details on the scope of the United States government’s secret surveillance programs, which have been dragged into public view and public debate by leaks from Mr. Snowden, who remains stranded in a Moscow airport.

The hearing came a week after the House voted narrowly to defeat an amendment to shut down the N.S.A.’s domestic phone record tracking program. The 217-to-205 vote was far closer than expected, and it — along with shifting poll numbers — suggested that momentum against the domestic program was building. In recent days even some of the most outspoken supporters of the program have said they are open to adjusting it.

The Obama administration has been trying to build public support for its surveillance programs, which trace back to the Bush administration, by arguing that they are subject to strict safeguards and court oversight and that they have helped thwart as many as 54 terrorist events. That figure, Mr. Leahy emphasized, relies upon conflating another program that allows surveillance targeted at noncitizens abroad, which has apparently been quite valuable, with the domestic one.

Still, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she supported overhauling the program but keeping it in place because it generates information that might prevent attacks.

John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the N.S.A., said there had been 13 investigations in which the domestic call tracking program made a “contribution.” He cited two discoveries: that several men in San Diego were sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia, and that a suspect who was already under scrutiny in a subway bomb plot was using a different phone.

Robert S. Litt, the top lawyer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, testified that the Obama administration was also “open to re-evaluating this program” to create greater public confidence that it protects privacy while “preserving the essence of the program.” Administration officials have emphasized that the program collects only so-called metadata, and not the contents of phone calls.

Still, the top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, asked skeptical questions about the legal basis for the program while criticizing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, for making inaccurate statements to Congress about it in March. Mr. Clapper has sinceapologized.

“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance,” Mr. Grassley said.

A series of slides describing XKeyscore, dated 2008, make it clear that the security agency system is collecting a huge amount of data on Internet activity around the globe, from chats on social networks to browsing of Web sites and searches on Google Maps. The volume of data is so vast that most of it is stored for only three days, although metadata — information showing logins and server activity, but not content — is stored for a month. Several of the pages were redacted by The Guardian.

Some of the servers the agency uses are run by foreign intelligence services of friendly nations, including Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but other servers may be on the soil of countries unaware the agency is mining Internet “pipes” on their soil. Some of the harvesting of data takes place on the coasts of the United States, and along the Mexican border. Most sites are in Europe, the Middle East, and along the borders of India, Pakistan, and China.

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The intelligence analysts search for terrorist cells by looking at “anomalous events” — someone searching in German from Pakistani sites, or an Iranian sending an encrypted Microsoft Word file. But one slide says the system can be used to identify anyone “searching the Web for suspicious stuff.”

 Declassified N.S.A. Documents on Data Collection

Read and search three documents related to the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records.

Related in Opinion

Editorial: More Fog From the Spy Agencies (August 1, 2013)

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The presentation says the system enables analysts to identify and pursue leads even if they do not yet know the name, or the e-mail address, of a suspect. “A large amount of time spent on the Web is performing actions that are anonymous,” it explains.

One example of how analysts might use the system is to search for whenever someone has started up a “virtual private network” in a particular country of interest; the networks are pipelines that add greater security to online communications. N.S.A. analysts are able to use the system to extract the activity retrospectively from “raw unselected bulk traffic,” the documents say, and then decrypt it to “discover the users.”

The agency said its surveillance of the Internet was part of its “lawful foreign signals intelligence collection” and not “arbitrary and unconstrained.” The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers, and the ranking Democrat, C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, said, “The program does not target American citizens.”

The XKeyscore presentation claimed the program had generated intelligence that resulted in the capture of more than 300 terrorists. By contrast, the documents released by the government about the domestic phone log program were more abstract.

They included briefing papers to Congress from2009 and 2011 about the “very large scale” logging of Americans’ calling records — along with a related program that logged Americans’ e-mails, and that was shut down later in 2011 — portraying the programs as providing a vital and important capability.

But Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been a leading critic of the bulk collection programs, said the program had been shut down because officials were unable “to provide evidence to support the claims” of operational value. Mr. Wyden has also questioned the utility of the phone log program.

The new documents also included an April “primary order” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that supported orders requiring phone companies to turn over all customer records. It said the government may access the records only when there are “facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the number to be searched is associated with terrorism.

However, it said that the results of each inquiry are then placed in a “corporate store” that analysts may search without any such limits. 

Intelligence officials have separately said that search results include not just a target’s phone records, but also exponentially larger sets of the records of people in as many as three concentric circles around the target.

Delete the NSA

Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished

He would know.

Photo Credit: Africa Rising/Shutterstock.com

July 26, 2013  |  

 

 

 

 

Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annualScience of Security (SoS) Competition. The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords.

And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet  blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become:

On a personal note, I’d be remiss not to mention my conflicted feelings about winning the award given what we know about the NSA’s widespread collection of private communications and what remains unknown about oversight over the agency’s operations. Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance. And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path.

In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance.Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.

In an  interview with Andy Cush at Animal, Bonneau went even farther in his critiques of the NSA:

I’d rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable…But my feeling based on what I’ve read is that I don’t want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now.

When Bonneau learned that he has won the award from the NSA, he considered turning it down. However, he ultimately decided upon accepting as a way to potentially bridge academic gaps with the NSA, as a means of opening up at least one avenue into the organization that has been mostly closed.

That said, the winner of the NSA award wants, like many privacy rights activists and citizens concerned with the government’s Fourth Amendment violations, for the NSA to be reformed by a political process (like the one which narrowly failed in the House yesterday).

Either that, or have it abolished altogether.

 

A New Progressive-Tea Party Majority

Momentum Builds Against N.S.A. Surveillance

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

Published: July 28, 2013                 WASHINGTON — The movement to crack down on government surveillance started with an odd couple from Michigan, Representatives Justin Amash, a young libertarian Republican known even to his friends as “chief wing nut,” and John Conyers Jr., an elder of the liberal left in his 25th House term.

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Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, is part of the movement to crack down on government surveillance.

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But what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House.

The rapidly shifting politics were reflected clearly in the House on Wednesday, when a plan to defund the National Security Agency’s telephone data collection program fell just seven votes short of passage. Now, after initially signaling that they were comfortable with the scope of the N.S.A.’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet activities, but not their content, revealed last month by Edward J. Snowden, lawmakers are showing an increasing willingness to use legislation to curb those actions.

Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, have begun work on legislation in the House Judiciary Committee to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone surveillance. Mr. Sensenbrenner said on Friday that he would have a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court.

“There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here,” Ms. Lofgren said.

The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has taken much of Washington by surprise. As the revelations by Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, were gaining attention in the news media, the White House and leaders in both parties stood united behind the programs he had unmasked. They were focused mostly on bringing the leaker to justice.

Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee met on Wednesday as the House deliberated to try to find accommodations to growing public misgivings about the programs, said the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat and longtime critic of the N.S.A. surveillance programs, said he had taken part in serious meetings to discuss changes.

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the panel, said, “We’re talking through it right now.” He added, “There are a lot of ideas on the table, and it’s pretty obvious that we’ve got some uneasy folks.”

Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has assured House colleagues that an intelligence policy bill he plans to draft in mid-September will include new privacy safeguards.

Aides familiar with his efforts said the House Intelligence Committee was focusing on more transparency for the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees data gathering, including possibly declassifying that court’s orders, and changes to the way the surveillance data is stored. The legislation may order such data to be held by the telecommunications companies that produce them or by an independent entity, not the government.

Lawmakers say their votes to restrain the N.S.A. reflect a gut-level concern among voters about personal privacy.

“I represent a very reasonable district in suburban Philadelphia, and my constituents are expressing a growing concern on the sweeping amounts of data that the government is compiling,” said Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican who represents one of the few true swing districts left in the House and who voted on Wednesday to limit N.S.A. surveillance.

Votes from the likes of Mr. Fitzpatrick were not initially anticipated when Republican leaders chided reporters for their interest in legislation that they said would go nowhere. As the House slowly worked its way on Wednesday toward an evening vote to curb government surveillance, even proponents of the legislation jokingly predicted that only the “wing nuts” — the libertarians of the right, the most ardent liberals on the left — would support the measure.

Then Mr. Sensenbrenner, a Republican veteran and one of the primary authors of the post-Sept. 11Patriot Act, stepped to a microphone on the House floor. Never, he said, did he intend to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records, nor did his legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of terrorism investigations.

“The time has come to stop it, and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

He had not intended to speak, and when he did, he did not say much, just seven brief sentences.

“I was able to say what needed to be said in a minute,” he said Friday.

First NON-GMO Labeling OKed

 

The American people want to know whether or not their food has genetically modified components inside. But for the most part, the FDA has resisted any efforts to label foods as GMO-free or containing GMOs. Now, however, advocates for Non-GMO foods have done their work with a different regulatory agency, the USDA, in order to get labeling approved for meats and eggs that also indicates if the animals were fed GM food, signaling a small but important success in the fight for a transparent food industry. You may have heard this news, but we’re trying to spread the word even more!

Meat and eggs derived from animals who were not fed genetically-modified feed can now be labeled as such. Companies like Mindful Meats, Mary’s Chicken, and Hidden Villa Ranch are already approved for the GMO-free label and others will likely join their ranks. But the journey to this point wasn’t a simple one.

Unlike the FDA, who normally controls food regulations, the USDA never used third-party organizations to certify food issues. Now, after a lengthy review of the Non-GMO Project, however,the USDA has determined their certification process is reliable and scientific, and is good enough to satisfy their regulatory rigors.

The Non-GMO Project worked closely with food makers like Mary’s Chicken to develop labeling standards that could be approved by the USDA. These standards needed to be “honest, accurate, and transparent,” according to NaturalNews, three things most of us want from our food regulators.

Prior to this approval, the USDA had denied several meat producers who wanted to use such a label. The reason: the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) was not done with their review of the Non-GMO Project standards and practices. It took the USDA more than a year to make this determination as it’s obviously something they were cautious of.

“We started meeting with them to find out what the key objections were and how we navigate through that,” Dave Carter of the National Bison Association told Food Navigator. “I think it will be a very important claim for the meat industry. The non GMO label is the fastest label claim in the marketplace. Consumers want to have that option.”

“It means everything to have this label and we’re very thankful that FSIS worked with us to get this approved,” said David Pitman of Mary’s Chicken, a company that currently has 17 non-GMO verified products on the market.

These companies are rolling out their labeled products right now. While the new labeling only applies to meat and eggs, it’s certainly a victory for those of us who believe we have the right to know what we are eating.

Roberts Stacks FISA Court With 86% GOP Hacks

Roberts’s Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Changing Makeup of Surveillance Courts

Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents.

In making assignments to the court, Chief Justice Roberts, more than his predecessors, has chosen judges with conservative and executive branch backgrounds that critics say make the court more likely to defer to government arguments that domestic spying programs are necessary.

Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials.

Though the two previous chief justices, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, were conservatives like Chief Justice Roberts, their assignments to the surveillance court were more ideologically diverse, according to an analysis by The New York Times of a list of every judge who has served on the court since it was established in 1978.

According to the analysis, 66 percent of their selections were Republican appointees, and 39 percent once worked for the executive branch.

“Viewing this data, people with responsibility for national security ought to be very concerned about the impression and appearance, if not the reality, of bias — for favoring the executive branch in its applications for warrants and other action,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and one of several lawmakers who have sought to change the way the court’s judges are selected.

Mr. Blumenthal, for example, has proposed that each of the chief judges of the 12 major appeals courts select a district judge for the surveillance court; the chief justice would still pick the review panel that hears rare appeals of the court’s decisions, but six other Supreme Court justices would have to sign off. Another bill, introduced by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, would give the president the power to nominate judges for the court, subject to Senate approval.

Chief Justice Roberts, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The court’s complexion has changed at a time when its role has been expanding beyond what Congress envisioned when it established the court as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The idea then was that judges would review applications for wiretaps to make sure there was sufficient evidence that the F.B.I.’s target was a foreign terrorist or a spy.

But, increasingly in recent years, the court has produced lengthy rulings interpreting the meaning of surveillance laws and constitutional rights based on procedures devised not for complex legal analysis but for up-or-down approvals of secret wiretap applications. The rulings are classified and based on theories submitted by the Justice Department without the participation of any lawyers offering contrary arguments or appealing a ruling if the government wins.

The court “is becoming ever more important in American life as more and more surveillance comes under its review in this era of big data,” said Timothy Edgar, a civil liberties adviser for intelligence issues in both the Bush and Obama administrations. “If the court is seen as skewed or biased, politically or ideologically, it will lose credibility.”

At a public meeting this month, Judge James Robertson, an appointee of President Bill Clinton who was assigned to the surveillance court in 2002 by Chief Justice Rehnquist and resigned from it in December 2005, offered an insider’s critique of how rapidly and recently the court’s role has changed. He said, for example, that during his time it was not engaged in developing a body of secret precedents interpreting what the law means.

“In my experience, there weren’t any opinions,” he said. “You approved a warrant application or you didn’t — period.”

The court began expanding its role when George W. Bush was president and its members were still assigned by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died in 2005. Midway through the Bush administration, the executive branch sought and obtained the court’s legal blessing to continue secret surveillance programs that had originally circumvented the FISA process.

The court’s power has also recently expanded in another way. In 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act to allow the National Security Agency to keep conducting a form of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without warrants on domestic soil so long as only foreigners abroad were targeted. It gave the court the power to create rules for the program, like how the government may use Americans’ communications after they are picked up.

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“That change, in my view, turned the FISA court into something like an administrative agency that makes rules for others to follow,” Judge Robertson said. “That’s not the bailiwick of judges. Judges don’t make policy.”

For the most part, the surveillance court judges — who serve staggered seven-year terms and take turns coming to Washington for a week to handle its business — do not discuss their work, and their rulings are secret. But the documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, have cast an unusual spotlight on them.

The first of the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden was a top-secret order to a Verizon subsidiary requiring it to turn over three months of calling records for all its customers. It was signed by Judge Roger Vinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan who had previously achieved prominence in 2011 when he tried to strike down the entirety of President Obama’s health care law. (!!!)

Chief Justice Roberts assigned Judge Vinson to the surveillance court in 2006, one of 12 Republican appointees, compared with 2 Democratic ones.

While the positions taken by individual judges on the court are classified, academic studies have shown that judges appointed by Republicans since Reagan have been more likely than their colleagues to rule in favor of the government in non-FISA cases over people claiming civil liberties violations. Even more important, according to some critics of the court, is the court’s increasing proportion of judges who have a background in the executive branch.

Senator Blumenthal, citing his own experience as a United States attorney and a state prosecutor, said judges who used to be executive branch lawyers were more likely to share a “get the bad guys” mind-set and defer to the Justice Department if executive branch officials told them that new surveillance powers were justified.

Steven G. Bradbury, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the second term of the Bush administration, argued that it made sense to put judges who were executive branch veterans on the court because they were already familiar with the issues. And he challenged the claim that they would be more deferential.

“When it comes to highly technical national security issues, I really think there is value in a judge being a former prosecutor or a former government lawyer who understands how the executive branch works,” he said, adding that such judges “will be familiar with the process and able to ask the tough questions and see where the weak points are.”

Either way, an executive branch background is increasingly common for the court.

When Judge Vinson’s term ended in May, for example, Chief Justice Roberts replaced him with Judge Michael W. Mosman, who was a federal prosecutor before becoming a judge.

Other current judges include Raymond J. Dearie, a United States attorney; Reggie B. Walton, a prosecutor who also worked on drug and crime issues for the White House; and F. Dennis Saylor IV, chief of staff in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The only Democratic appointee, Judge Mary A. McLaughlin, was also a prosecutor.

Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said having executive branch veterans — including what he called “law-and-order Democrats” — on the court carried advantages because they brought experience with security issues. But the downside, he argued, is that they may also be unduly accommodating to government requests.

“The further the court’s authority has expanded from where it was in 1978, the greater the need has been for independent-minded government skeptics on the court,” he said.

Chief justices have considerable leeway in choosing judges — the only requirement is that they ensure geographic diversity. In practice, according to people familiar with the court, they have been assisted in evaluating whom to select by the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. The counselor to the chief justice and the surveillance court’s presiding judge also sometimes play a role. Judges sometimes volunteer for consideration, while chief justices and their advisers sometimes come up with their own ideas.

Generally, the people familiar with the court said, evaluations have been based on reputation, workload, willingness to undergo an intrusive background check, and experience in security issues. Judges have served an average of 15 years before being assigned to the surveillance court.

Chief Justice Roberts has dealt with a small circle. His past two choices to direct the judiciary’s administrative office have been Republican-appointed judges, Thomas F. Hogan and John D. Bates, whom he also appointed to the surveillance court.

Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, who has filed a bill that would let Congressional leaders pick eight of the court’s members, said it was time for the court to have a more diverse membership.

“They all seem to have some type of a pretty conservative bent,” he said. “I don’t think that is what the Congress envisioned when giving the chief justice that authority. Maybe they didn’t think about the ramifications of giving that much power to one person.”

The ROLL CALL VOTE to REPEAL NSA SPYING

Progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans UNITE.

94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted to stop the NSA collecting every phone record on every phone call. 

134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted to let the NSA keep spying on us.  These are 1% corrupted, blinded, bought off temporary Congress Members who need to fall Nov. 2014.

Representing the 1% Corporates, there's Democrat Nancy Pelosi right next to GOP's John Boehner. Rep. (Felon) Issa,  voted to let the NSA keep spying, whereas Rep. Gohmert, who's been ridiculous on tech issues, voted to stop the spying. Oddly Progressive Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Chris Van Hollen, voted for the NSA.

Amash Amodei Bachus Barton Bass Becerra Bentivolio Bishop (UT) Black Blackburn Blumenauer Bonamici Brady (PA) Braley (IA) Bridenstine Broun (GA) Buchanan Burgess Capps Capuano Cardenas Carson (IN) Cartwright Cassidy Chabot Chaffetz Chu Cicilline Clarke Clay Cleaver Clyburn Coffman Cohen Connolly Conyers Courtney Cramer Crowley Cummings Daines Davis, Danny Davis, Rodney DeFazio DeGette DeLauro DelBene DeSantis DesJarlais Deutch Dingell Doggett Doyle Duffy Duncan (SC) Duncan (TN) Edwards Ellison Eshoo Farenthold Farr Fattah Fincher Fitzpatrick Fleischmann Fleming Fudge Gabbard Garamendi

Gardner Garrett Gibson Gohmert Gosar Gowdy Graves (GA) Grayson Green, Gene Griffin (AR) Griffith (VA) Grijalva Hahn Hall Harris Hastings (FL) Holt Honda Huelskamp Huffman Huizenga (MI) Hultgren Jeffries Jenkins Johnson (OH) Jones Jordan Keating Kildee Kingston Labrador LaMalfa Lamborn Larson (CT) Lee (CA) Lewis Loebsack Lofgren Lowenthal Lujan Grisham (NM) Lujan, Ben Ray (NM) Lummis Lynch Maffei Maloney, Carolyn Marchant Massie Matsui McClintock McCollum McDermott McGovern McHenry McMorris Rodgers Meadows Mica Michaud Miller, Gary Miller, George Moore Moran Mullin Mulvaney Nadler Napolitano Neal Nolan Nugent O'Rourke

Owens Pascrell Pastor (AZ) Pearce Perlmutter Perry Petri Pingree (ME) Pocan Poe (TX) Polis Posey Price (GA) Radel Rahall Rangel Ribble Rice (SC) Richmond Roe (TN) Rohrabacher Ross Rothfus Roybal-Allard Rush Salmon Sanchez, Linda T. Sanchez, Loretta Sanford Sarbanes Scalise Schiff Schrader Schweikert Scott (VA) Sensenbrenner Serrano Shea-Porter Sherman Smith (MO) Smith (NJ) Southerland Speier Stewart Stockman Swalwell (CA) Takano Thompson (MS) Thompson (PA) Tierney Tipton Tonko Tsongas Vela Velazquez Walz Waters Watt Waxman Weber (TX) Welch Williams Wilson (SC) Yarmuth Yoder Yoho Young (AK)

House Nearly Repeals NSA Spying 217-205

In a Close Vote, Congress Shamefully Defeats 

Amendment That Sought to Curtail NSA 

Surveillance  (217  -  205  close!)

The US House of Representatives came within a few votes of passing a novel amendment that attempted to strike out funding for the highly contentious NSA calling records surveillance program. Under this program, the NSA acquires the records of who you called, when you called, and how long you spoke—for all calls made within the United States, including international, long distance, and even local.

The amendment was part of the Defense Appropriations Bill (basically, the budget for the Department of Defense, of which NSA is a part), and was eloquently supported by a bipartisan coalition of Reps. Justin Amash, John Conyers, Jr., Thomas Massie, Mick Mulvaney, and Jared Polis. The push by Rep. Amash was a great step forward and comes in the wake of a combative House Judiciary hearing during which many members voiced opposition to unconstitutional NSA spying.

Unfortunately, Congress was unable to muster the votes to pass this important amendment. The amendment failed, with an extremely close vote of 205 to 217.

"This amendment reflected the deep discomfort of Americans who don’t want the government collecting data on them indiscriminately. This type of surveillance is unnecessary and unconstitutional, a needless return to the general warrants that our country’s founders fought against," said Kurt Opsahl, EFF Senior Staff Attorney.

The principal author of the PATRIOT Act in 2001, Rep. Sensenbrenner, was among the strongest supporters of the Amash amendment, urging his fellow Congress members to support this effort to rein in NSA: "The time has come to stop it and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment."

"We were heartened by the many supporters from across the country who called their representative to support the amendment, laying the foundation for further Congressional action to investigate the NSA spying and enact greater privacy protections," said Rainey Reitman, EFF Activism Director.

Congress may not have stood up against the mass spying today, but the fight is not over. Earlier this month, EFF filed First Unitarian v. NSA to stop the spying and get the judiciary to rule that the call records program is illegal and unconstitutional. And earlier this month, a federal court rejected the government’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in Jewel v. NSA,allowing that case to continue. 

EFF will continue to push Congress to rein in unconstitutional surveillance.  Please add your name to our campaign by signing Stopwatching.us.