Senate Passes Major NSA Reform Bill
The USA Freedom Act, which will restore but reform the expired
Patriot Act's spy authorities, earned final passage in the Senate
Tuesday and was signed by the president.
(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
Images)
June 2, 2015 After weeks of
tense standoffs marked by the lapse of parts of the Patriot
Act, the Senate on Tuesday easily passed comprehensive
surveillance reform, ending a chapter of high-stakes
brinkmanship on Capitol Hill that eventually concluded with
lawmakers taking their first significant step away from the
post-9/11 national security policies that have come to
define two presidencies.
Lawmakers approved 67-32 the House-passed USA Freedom
Act, which would restore the three provisions of the Patriot
Act that expired June 1, but also usher in a number of
changes designed to better protect privacy and increase
transparency of the government's surveillance operations. It
will also transition toward an effective end to the National
Security Agency's bulk collection of U.S. call data.
The measure was swiftly signed by President Obama, who
cheered its passage on Twitter.
The Senate earlier rejected a host of amendments offered
by McConnell that were intended to weaken the legislation.
Those proposals came only after the majority leader buckled
under growing pressure to allow the reform measure—which he
initially whipped aggressively against—to go forward.
Before the final vote, McConnell made one last
impassioned plea to his colleagues, despite the bill's
victory being clear. Casting blame on Obama, McConnell said
the U.S. would be more at risk of terrorist attacks after
the bill's passage.
"While the president has inflexibly clung to campaign
promises made in 2008, the threat of al-Qaida has
metastasized around the world," McConnell said. Now was not
the time, he said, to "take one more tool away."
"We're talking about call-data records," he added,
raising his voice. "Nobody's civil liberties are being
violated here."
Others disagreed, including a wide-ranging chorus of
supporters—tech firms, privacy advocates, civil
libertarians, and tea-party activists—who viewed the Freedom
Act as a critical step toward restoring rights lost in the
rush to protect security after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001. And some, including Republican presidential
candidate Sen. Rand Paul, said the legislation does not go
far enough.
The Freedom Act's passage is the crescendo of nearly two
years of start-and-stop bipartisan, bicameral work to pull
back the government's post-9/11 surveillance powers that
began shortly after the disclosures by former intelligence
contractor Edward Snowden in June of 2013.
Most notably, the bill would end the NSA's once-secret
interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify
its bulk collection of U.S. call metadata, the first and
most controversial of the programs exposed by Snowden. In
lieu of that mass-surveillance regime, the Freedom Act calls
for a transition within 6 months to a system where phone
companies provide records to government spies on an
as-needed, more-targeted basis after judicial approval is
obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee,
called the Freedom Act's passage an "historic moment" that amounted to
"the most significant surveillance reform in decades." The Vermont
Democrat has been a main architect of the Freedom Act from the
beginning, twice seeing the legislation fail before the Senate before
finally seeing it triumph on Tuesday.
Leahy was able to consistently hold virtually all Democrats together
behind the reform package, as few wavered from supporting the bill. But
though the Freedom Act earned lopsided bipartisan support in the House,
Republican votes in the Senate proved incredibly more difficult to find.
Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican and another author of the Freedom
Act, engaged in the highest-profile whipping operation of his career
Tuesday, pacing on the Senate floor just inches away from the running
vote tally with notecards he'd sketched out of those who were with him
already and those who might be convinced to join him in voting down
McConnell's amendments.
"I really enjoyed it," Lee said. "I really enjoyed working with Sen.
Leahy and I'm really passionate about this issue. There was no phase of
this exercise that was easy, so every single vote that we got we worked
really hard for."
Lee appeared to be a much larger presence on the floor of the Senate
during the amendments votes than even Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn.
The Senate's No. 2 Republican had been aggressively whipping in favor of
McConnell's attempts to weaken the bill for weeks, but after the first
amendment went down on a solid 42-56 margin, Cornyn appeared to take a
step back.
"We killed him on that first one and he could see which way it was
going, so it diminished after that," one Senate Republican who opposed
the amendments said. "But he has whipped aggressively at every stage of
this. I just think he knew he was going to lose."
"This is only the beginning," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat,
said at a conference after the final vote. "There is a lot more to do."
The staunch civil-liberties advocate said he hoped to seize the
momentum of the Freedom Act's passage to move quickly on reforming
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is up
for renewal in 2017 and involves the monitoring of some content of
Internet communications.
Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, weighed in on the
legislation as final votes were underway Tuesday during a live
video-stream discussion with Amnesty International UK, calling its
changes to Section 215—in addition to a recent federal appeals court
decision deeming the NSA program illegal—"not enough."
"It's a first step, and it's an important step," he added.
McConnell relented earlier this week to allowing the Freedom Act to
go forward—but not before he and Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard
Burr offered a handful of amendments that they said would make the bill
more workable. But those edits immediately prompted stiff resistance
from the White House, the House of Representatives, and privacy
advocates, who unanimously called on the increasingly isolated majority
leader to immediately pass the Freedom Act unchanged.
The writing began to appear on the wall for McConnell's amendments
earlier in the day, as Republican Sen. John Barrasso joined the House
GOP's morning conference meeting to brief them on the Senate's actions
on everything from a must-pass transportation bill to health care. The
topic quickly turned to the Freedom Act, however, with House members
stating they were not interested in seeing any "poison pill" amendments
added to their bill.
According to several members in the room, one of the bill's original
sponsors, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner—who also authored the
original Patriot Act—led the discussion, making it clear that
McConnell's amendments would not be accepted. Even Rep. Peter King, a
GOP defense hawk from New York who supports the changes McConnell is
trying to make, said it was time to let it go.
(RELATED:
Who Killed the Patriot Act?)
The Freedom Act's passage amounts to the first major loss of
McConnell's six-month stewardship over the Senate as majority leader—a
position of power the Kentucky senator has long coveted.
When the taciturn strategist seized the reins of the chamber with the
GOP takeover of the Senate after last year's election, he pledged to
move away from the governing-by-crisis model that has gripped Capitol
Hill in recent years—but the Patriot Act debate has been defined by a
sequence of dramatic standoffs remarkable even by Washington standards.
McConnell was stymied before the Memorial Day recess by Rand Paul,
his fellow Republican from Kentucky who is using his stiff opposition to
government surveillance as a central plank—and fundraising machine—of
his presidential campaign. Paul, along with Democratic Sens. Wyden and
Martin Heinrich, blocked efforts by McConnell to extend the Patriot Act
deadline even by one day, forcing the Senate to return for a rare Sunday
session this week to avoid going over the cliff.
But Paul continued to use the power afforded to one senator to delay
votes and force an expiration, while many blamed McConnell for waiting
to take up consideration of the Freedom Act until the last minute in
order to use the clock to his advantage.
Copyright © 2015 by National Journal Group Inc
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