NSA Surveillance Reform Bill Passes Government Vote

The US House of Representatives has, as widely expected, voted in favour of the government bill designed to reform the mass-surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA).

This happened despite the wide-spread opposition of the tech industry, angry that the bill’s last minute amendments watered down its powers.

Vote Passed

The ‘USA Freedom Act’ was passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats (303 votes for, 121 against) in favour of it. This outcome means that the ability of the NSA to conduct the bulk collection of US telephone metadata without oversight will be curtailed.

In reality however, this meta data will now be stored with the telecommunication companies themselves such as Verizon Communications and AT&T. The NSA will simply have to seek approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to search these records.

And there seems to be some recognition in political circles that the bill will do little to curb the NSA’s snooping activities in future.

“Perfect is rarely possible in politics, and this bill is no exception,” Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, who led efforts on the House judiciary committee to rein in the NSA, was quoted as saying by the Guardian newspaper.

“In order to preserve core operations of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the administration insisted on broadening certain authorities and lessening certain restrictions. Some of the changes raise justifiable concerns. I don’t blame people for losing trust in their government, because the government violated their trust,” he reportedly said.

Widespread Opposition

The bill has also been opposed by privacy groups and big names in the tech industry, who argue that it does not go far enough.

The Reform Government Surveillance coalition, whose members include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, DropBox, and Yahoo, this week became the latest to voice their opposition to the bill and withdraw their support.

The Open Technology Institute has already withdrawn its support for the bill, as have the Computer & Communications Industry Association. Meanwhile the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) lamented the passing of the bill in the House of Representatives.

“CDT supported the bill when it was introduced and supported the bill that was approved by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. However, CDT and other civil liberties groups, as well as major tech companies, were all forced to withdraw their support after the USA FREEDOM Act was gutted at the last minute,” said CDT Senior Counsel Harley Geiger.

“The ban on bulk collection was deliberately watered down to be ambiguous and exploitable,” said Geiger. “We withdrew support for USA FREEDOM when the bill morphed into a codification of large-scale, untargeted collection of data about Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism.”

“The USA Freedom Act only prohibits bulk collection if you define “bulk collection” as nationwide surveillance,” added Geiger. “The USA FREEDOM Act leaves open the possibility for the government to engage in broad surveillance of cities, regions, or even entire states under a single court order, and to obtain records on the Internet traffic of large numbers of people. We cannot support a bill that continues to authorise untargeted surveillance at such a massive scale.”

The USA Freedom Act now moves to the Senate, where Senator Leahy previously introduced the companion to the original USA Freedom Act.

“We hope the Senate makes significant improvements to the bill to provide the protections from mass surveillance that the public deserves,” said Geiger.

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