With a month-and-a-half to go until key post-9/11 surveillance authorities expire, committed National Security Agency reformers are unlikely to succeed in making major changes to the beleaguered spy agency.
A compromise bill, similar to legislation narrowly defeated last year, is currently being hashed out to transfer the bulk collection of phone records from the government to the telecom industry—a move that would require the NSA to submit requests for relevant records from private carriers.
It could be introduced as early as this week, according to a report published Thursday by The Hill.
Even with the tweak, it’s likely that spy agencies will still collect data—including information on American citizens—in bulk. As it was revealed earlier this month, when a metadata dragnet run by the Drug Enforcement Agency was shuttered in 2013, the agency was still able to collect thousands of records via daily subpoenas.
In addition to transitioning bulk metadata collection to the private sector, the latest legislative proposal would reportedly make only modest reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), by instituting a panel of privacy advocates to weigh in against the government’s requests. The top secret court has been criticized as a rubber-stamp for approving roughly 99 percent of all surveillance requests by the feds.
Also preserved, under the bill, would be NSA surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and powers the White House has claimed under Executive Order 12333—foreign surveillance authorities that have been widely reported to result in the mass collection of American citizens’ internet and communications data.
Lawmakers close to the negotiating process—the chair and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees—and the author of the original PATRIOT Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), claim the new bill would effectively put a stop to the NSA’s collection of All effectively end the bulk collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records—a program revealed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
NSA allies in Congress hope the minor changes to the agency will be exchanged for another extension of the PATRIOT Act. The landmark post-9/11 surveillance bill has certain key provisions that expire on June 1 including so-called Section 215 authorities, which underpinned the collection of metadata and other “business records.”
One congressional aide told The Hill that the bargain legislation could be scuppered by reformers.
“They can either have a fight about sunset, or they can take a very reasonable compromise bill. Those are the only two choices,” the staffer said.
That calculation, however, is a gamble considering that it was civil libertarian-minded lawmakers in the Senate who defeated last year’s attempt at similar reform.
