Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday that legislation concerning the federal government’s powers of surveillance that was passed by the House of Representatives this week could cause the country to “go dark” when it comes to collecting Americans’ phone records.

McConnell said that if such a state of affairs came about, “we’ll not be able to have yet another tool that we need to combat this terrorist threat from overseas”.

The USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency – as revealed in the Guardian in 2013 through the whistleblower Edward Snowden – passed the House this week by a wide margin. It is now headed for the Senate.



Earlier this month, such mass phone surveillance was ruled illegal by the US court of appeals. Under the USA Freedom Act, intelligence officials would only be able to search data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis.

McConnell opposes that, instead seeking an extension of section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which the bulk collection of phone records has taken place, for a few months, while legislators took a closer look at the House plan.

In their ruling on the matter, the appeal court judges said: “We hold that the text of section 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorise the telephone metadata program.”

Nevertheless McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, appeared on ABC on Sunday and said he would like to see an extension.

“The bill that passed the House does not require the telephone companies to keep the records,” he said. “I figure the House-passed bill will basically end the programme, and I want to reassure everybody, there are plenty of safeguards in this programme, and nobody at the NSA is routinely listening in to your telephone conversations in order to intercept any actual discussion on a telephone. They have to go to a court, get a court order.”

McConnell added that the bulk collection of phone records had “been a very important part of our effort to defend the homeland since 9/11. We know that the terrorists overseas are trying to recruit people in our country to commit atrocities in our country. We saw a great example of just what I’m talking about in the Boston Marathon massacre.

“I don’t want us to go dark, in effect, and I’m afraid that the House-passed bill will basically be the end of the programme, and we’ll not be able to have yet another tool that we need to combat this terrorist threat from overseas.”

If Congress does not act by 1 June, authority to collect the phone records will expire, along with two other intelligence-related provisions.