Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul this week (R-Ky.) unsuccessfully sought to broaden the scope of a prominent surveillance reform bill that the Senate is expected to pass Tuesday evening.
The pair of lawmakers were blocked by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in their attempt to attach even more civil liberties-minded amendments to the legislation
“Wyden and Paul called on Republican leaders to allow votes on amendments to strengthen privacy protections, rather than forcing votes on amendments that would water down the USA Freedom Act,” Sen. Wyden’s office said in a press release on Tuesday.
Currently, the USA Freedom Act focuses primarily on the ending the governments telephone metadata dragnet—the first of a series of top secret surveillance programs revealed by journalists who started working with Snowden in June 2013.
The amendments pushed by Paul and Wyden go beyond the phone dragnet, and hone in on other abusive NSA activities revealed by the press, including attempts to weaken encryption standards, and the agency’s “backdoor” surveillance of Americans’ communication collected under separate spying authorities.
A measure focused on stopping the NSA’s backdoor surveillance of Americans passed the House last year as an amendment to an annual Department of Defense spending bill. The language, however, was stripped from the bill by the time it made it to President Obama’s desk.
“The fact of the matter is, we are now here because the majority leader wasn’t able to defeat surveillance reform so instead he has chosen to introduce amendment s designed to water it down,” Wyden said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
“I’m disappointed by this,” he added.
Other provisions offered by the two privacy-minded lawmakers would “require court approval for National Security Letters,” facilitate the challenging of “illegally obtained surveillance information in criminal proceedings,” and put restrictions on law enforcement officials’ “ability to use information gathered under intelligence authorities in unrelated criminal cases.”
Another amendment purports to clarify the USA Freedom Act’s definition of a “specific selection term,” which, privacy-minded supporters say, will limit how the government can search phone records collected by telecoms companies. While lawmakers have gone to great lengths to tighten the definition of a “specific selection term” in the USA Freedom Act, Sen. Paul and others have claimed that language is still too broad, and may actually codify bulk collection for this first time.
Lawmakers in Washington have reluctantly given Edward Snowden credit for the surveillance debate currently gripping Congress—one that isn’t likely to fade, after the current legislative wrangling has finished. At least one member has promised to use the upcoming appropriations process and the power of the purse to further rein in the NSA.
On Monday the administration reiterated its commitment to prosecuting Snowden for his disclosures.
