Bill ending NSA phone data collection heads to Obama

By Mike DeBonis and Ellen Nakashima June 2 at 4:18 PM

BREAKING NEWS: The Senate ended more than a week of sharp debate, passing the USA Freedom Act. It will end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone records after a six-month transition period.

The Senate remained on track to pass a significant remake of U.S. surveillance powers Tuesday, after an internal split among Republicans delayed consideration of the bill and caused the legal authority for key counterterrorism programs to temporarily expire.

By a vote of 83 to 14, the measure cleared a crucial procedural hurdle, as senators acted to close debate on the USA Freedom Act, a House-passed bill that would end the National Security Agency’s practice of collecting troves of call data from telephone companies. It would instead mandate a six-month transition to a system in which the data would remain in private hands but could be searched on a case-by-case basis under a court order.

In the run-up to the expiration of the program and others early Monday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) objected to efforts to quickly pass either the House bill or short-term extensions of current law, frustrating both the White House and his fellow Senate Republicans.

[Frustration mounts as Rand Paul refuses to accelerate Senate NSA votes]

Roving wiretaps, the NSA phone records collection and the "lone wolf" provision are some of the most controversial parts of the Patriot Act. PostTV breaks down what you need to know about these sections. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

“This is the Senate, and members are entitled to different views, and members have tools to assert those views. It’s the nature of the body where we work,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday. “But what’s happened has happened, and we are where we are. Now is the time to put all that in the past and work together to diligently make some discrete and sensible improvements to the House bill.”

Those “improvements,” however, threaten to further delay passage of the legislation. Any change would send the bill back to the House, where its fate would be uncertain.

Early in a series of votes on amendments to the bill, enough Republicans were opposing McConnell’s proposed changes to suggest that the legislation was on track for approval without modification, which would send the bill to President Obama for his signature by day’s end.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Monday reiterated his preference to have the Senate pass the already approved House bill, withoutany amendments, so that it can be sent to Obama’s desk quickly. “I still think the best advice for them is to pass our bill,” he told reporters.

Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee, which crafted the USA Freedom Act on a bipartisan basis, said in a statement that the House is “not likely to accept the changes proposed,” which would “only serve to weaken the House-passed bill and postpone timely enactment of legislation that responsibly protects national security while enhancing civil liberty protections.”

[Sun sets on some NSA surveillance powers as Rand Paul foils extension]

McConnell on Tuesday downplayed the House threats, saying the Senate reserved the right to act as it saw fit, regardless of the pending lapse in surveillance authority.

“You’d think it was the Ten Commandments,” he said of House leaders’ insistence that the bill pass without changes.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a close McConnell ally, said he was concerned about the lapse but more concerned about a possible weakening of national security capabilities under the House-passed bill. “Look, if we’re talking about a day or two, I think we ought to do what we can to try to make it better,” he said.

McConnell’s amendments would tweak the USA Freedom Act — the product of months of intense negotiations between lawmakers, intelligence officials, civil libertarians and telecommunications companies — to give further assurances that intelligence officials will be able to effectively search private phone records.

As written, the bill would also reauthorize other, less controversial counterterrorism tools, such as “roving wiretaps” of criminal suspects who frequently switch phones to evade authorities.

One amendment set for a Senate vote would extend the transition period away from bulk collection to one year in order, in McConnell’s words, to “ensure that there is adequate time . . . to build and test a system that doesn’t yet exist.”

Another would require the new system to be certified as viable by the director of national intelligence, and a third would require telecom companies to notify the government if they change their data-retention policies.

None of the amendments go as far as McConnell and most Republicans wanted to preserve the status quo, but Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested they would improve national security while not watering down the bill so much that it would be rejected by the House.

For instance, Burr said, a year-long transition was a compromise from the two-year transition he favors. “I think that’s a happy spot for us to agree,” he said Monday. “I hope by tomorrow afternoon, we can have this completed and that we can send it to the House, and by the time we go to bed tomorrow night, this might all be back into place.”

Paul sought amendments of his own that would take the bill in the opposite direction, further restricting surveillance powers in a bid to preserve civil liberties. But McConnell employed a procedural maneuver to prevent amendments other than his own.

Besides “roving wiretaps,” two other Patriot Act provisions that lapsed Monday are Section 215, which not only justified NSA’s bulk collection but also is used in less controversial fashion to obtain records on individual terrorist suspects, and an authority that permits surveillance on a “lone wolf” suspect who cannot be linked to a specific terrorist group. The latter power has never been used.

During the lapse, the intelligence community is not completely without tools. It has other investigative powers, such as national security letters and traditional wiretaps, that it can use. And, to be sure, there are investigations launched before Sunday in which the expired tools were used, and the surveillance authorized by those tools may continue under a grandfather clause in the Patriot Act, Earnest said.

A national security official confirmed that “the existing orders are still good” under that clause. But, he said, “it’s not a good long-term solution. Or even a mid-term solution.”

If the FBI turns up a new terrorist suspect this week, it cannot use any of the expired tools to investigate that person, said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

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