The White House said it was “encouraged” by the return of a last-ditch bill to jettison the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of US phone records, even as the bill’s reauthorization of expiring surveillance powers under the Patriot Act is costing the bill civil libertarian support.

The 2015 version of the USA Freedom Act was released on Tuesday, following nearly 10 weeks of closed-door negotiations in Congress. Advocates of the bill, which passed the House in May before narrowly failing in the Senate in November, are leveraging the imminent expiration of a surveillance authority in the 2001 Patriot Act to push the USA Freedom Act to passage.



But the bill must compete with an alternative effort in the Senate, backed by the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and intelligence committee chairman, Richard Burr, that would preserve both Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the controversial mass domestic surveillance disclosed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden. By law, section 215 expires on 1 June.

Further imperiling the bill are civil libertarian groups that prefer a straight expiration of Section 215 – which authorizes the FBI to collect business records outside normal warrant or subpoena channels, and which the Justice Department has held since 2006 as the basis for domestic NSA bulk phone-records collection – to a bill they consider to insufficiently protect privacy.

The USA Freedom Act, as reported by the Guardian last week, contains several concessions to pro-surveillance legislators meant to facilitate its passage. Among them are expansions of temporary spying authorities to account for surveillance targets transiting into and out of the US, and an unrelated expansion of penalties for people convicted of lending “material support” to terrorism.



More directly related to the Section 215 debate, the USA Freedom Act will extend the Patriot Act powers until 2019.

Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, signaled dissatisfaction with the 2015 version of the USA Freedom Act.

“The bill doesn’t go nearly far enough,” Jaffer said in a statement.

“While we appreciate the hard work of legislators like Senator Leahy, Representative Sensenbrenner, and Representative Conyers, this bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision – the material-support provision – would be a step backwards. The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform. Congress should let Section 215 sunset as it’s scheduled to, and then it should turn to reforming the other surveillance authorities that have been used to justify bulk collection.”

Civil libertarians are divided on the USA Freedom Act. Supporters inside and outside Congress argue that it is the strongest check on overly broad surveillance that US legislators will realistically pass. Different civil libertarians contend that a stronger check would be to allow Section 215 to die under the weight of congressional inertia and fear that passing the USA Freedom Act would trade expiration for a bill many in the privacy and technology communities found difficult to support in 2014.

Amie Stepanovich, policy manager of the digital-rights group Access, offered support for the bill in a statement.

“Introduction of the USA Freedom Act is a significant step toward meaningful surveillance reform. Congress has considered multiple ways to rein in the NSA for almost two years but has failed to take any real action. We are running out of time, and the people are running out of patience,” Stepanovich said.

The new version of the House bill somewhat tightens its definition of a “specific selection term”, the root thing that the NSA would be empowered to collect under the USA Freedom Act – a definition civil libertarians criticized last year for being overbroad.

Tuesday’s version retains the definition of information identifying “a person, account, address, or personal device, or any other specific identifier” but rules out “a broad geographic region, including the United States, a city, a county, a State, a zip code or an area code”.



The Center on Democracy and Technology, which is supporting the USA Freedom Act, assessed the definition to “somewhat … address loopholes in certain terms that could be used to collect data on thousands or millions of Americans”.

A coalition of technology giants – including Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – endorsed the new USA Freedom Act on Tuesday, calling it a “common sense bill that addresses the concerns of industry, the Intelligence Community, and civil society in a constructive and balanced manner”.



The bill’s advocates on Tuesday expected most of the House judiciary committee, Republicans and Democrats, to co-sponsor the bill. The committee plans to mark it up and vote on the bill Thursday, and hope for a vote on the House floor the second week of May – leaving another two weeks for the Senate to decide what to do about surveillance.

A complementary version in the Senate, again sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, is expected as well.

The senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, whose leadership has embraced bulk domestic NSA phone-records surveillance, lent his support to the bill.

“The introduction today of a revised version of the USA Freedom Act is an important milestone in the road to reform of our surveillance programs,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday.

National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said the White House was “encouraged” by the reintroduction of the USA Freedom Act. But Price stopped short of pledging White House support for the bill – a version of which it supported in 2014 after the NSA and its congressional advocates sharply weakened its privacy and transparency provisions.



“While we are continuing to review the text of the bill, we are encouraged by today’s introduction of bipartisan, bicameral legislation that seeks to implement these important reforms,” Price said.

“We look forward to partnering with leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate as they work to pass a bill ahead of the June expiration of important intelligence authorities. The introduction of this legislation is an important step in the right direction.”