The USA Freedom Act

The USA Freedom Act passed on Tuesday, is a domestic surveillance reform bill that would extend the bulk phone metadata collection program of the National Security Agency (NSA) for another six months, after which the practice will be ended. According to the USA Freedom Act, the NSA’s controversial bulk phone metadata collection program, which expired Monday, will continue for another six months. After the six-months, the United States government will no longer be allowed to store any phone metadata of the US public. Instead, phone companies will take on the responsibility of storing phone metadata, and federal agencies will be required to get a court warrant before accessing phone metadata of certain case.

 

Spy Court Gives NSA The Go Ahead

On Friday, the federal court overseeing spy agencies reauthorized the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Reauthorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) allows the NSA to continue to warrantlessly collect “metadata” in bulk about people’s phone calls. The records contain information about which numbers people called, when and how long they talked, but not the actual content of their conversations.

The House passed a bill to end the bulk collection program earlier this year, and instead allow the federal government to search for specific records in phone companies’ databases with a court order. Privacy advocates complained, warning that the legislation was too broad and would have allowed the NSA to conduct searches for every number in a certain area code, for instance, or every Verizon subscriber. Since then, lawmakers in the Senate have spent months hashing out a bill.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a new version of the USA Freedom Act earlier this summer. It has managed to win support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as well as privacy advocates, technology companies and the Obama administration.The Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence believe that it reflects a reasonable compromise that preserves essential intelligence community capabilities, enhances privacy and civil liberties, and increases transparency. Some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in opposition of the bill, warned that the bill could  cut the legs out from under the nation’s spies.

The Senate has yet to take action on the legislation and it could face an uphill fight amid a busy legislative calender.The NSA’s phone records program needs to be reauthorized by the FISC every 90 days. The current authority expires on Dec. 5