President Barack Obama is remaining publicly neutral as two surveillance reform bills are heard in House committees this week.

On Wednesday afternoon the House Judiciary Committee will consider the USA Freedom Act, favored by civil libertarians including whistleblower Edward Snowden. On Thursday morning the House Intelligence Committee will consider behind closed doors a rival bill offered by the National Security Agency's most vocal supporters.

The committee hearings were announced in close succession Monday – suggesting a dash to the House floor.

The Freedom Act’s path forward was greased by a dense 35-page amendment that tweaks various parts of the original bill. Sponsor Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., endorsed the changes in a joint statement with Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich.

Among its alterations, the amendment moves changes to NSA call-record collection closer to Obama's proposal. It would allow the NSA to collect records from phone companies for two “hops” through a target’s contacts with prior court approval. The records would be collected in renewable 180-day periods and would be destroyed after five years in most cases.

“The [call record] part of the amendment is a result of meetings with the administration and their proposal,” a Republican congressional aide tells U.S. News. “But they did not have input on the rest of the bill.”

The just-announced changes almost certainly make Sensenbrenner's bill more palatable to the administration and fence-sitting members of Congress, and significantly won the assent of the Judiciary Committee leaders necessary for the bill's advancement.

After months of defending the agency's bulk collection of all American phone records, Obama announced in March he favors ending the NSA's in-house collection and five-year retention of the records, and said he would like judges to authorize the record-collection on a case-by-case basis.

Unlike the Freedom Act, the Intelligence Committee bill would not require the NSA to acquire a warrant before collecting call records. One of the primary sponsors of the Intelligence Committee bill, Rep. C. A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., nonetheless touted that proposal in March as "very, very close" to the White House's preferred reforms.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden tells U.S. News the president is not supporting either bill “at this point.”

“Over the last several months we have been in touch with congressional leadership and relevant committees regarding the president’s proposal to reform the Section 215 program, and we hope to see appropriate legislation adopting his proposal enacted quickly,” Hayden says.



The NSA secretly collected American call records for seven years before Snowden’s bombshell leaks were published in June 2013. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act as allowing the data dragnet – something Sensenbrenner, author of the Patriot Act, denies that the 2001 law authorized.

Though the Freedom Act changes may break a monthslong committee bottleneck, it has the possibility of alienating more hard-line privacy reformers.

“I will carefully review Judiciary Committee-revised version of #FreedomAct,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., tweeted Monday. “Just a weakened bill or worse than status quo? I'll find out.”

Amash sponsored an amendment to defund the bulk phone record program that failed in the House by 12 votes on July 24, 2013. The dramatic vote was preceded by frantic lobbying to retain the program by administration officials and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

After the vote, Amash flirted with the idea of future floor amendments. As of Tuesday morning, he has not developed a position on the Freedom Act changes. “We're looking at it today,” says Will Adams, Amash's spokesman..

Other privacy advocates, meanwhile, offered mixed preliminary verdicts.

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“[W]e are deeply concerned about the number of ‘hops’ that the bill would permit, as well as the undefined phrase ‘selection term,’ which may leave the door open to government attempts to take a nonintuitive interpretation of the language,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-minded advocacy group, said in a statement. “We are also concerned that this bill omits important transparency provisions found in the USA Freedom Act, which are necessary to shed light on surveillance abuses."

Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office, was more upbeat, saying: "The mere fact that the Judiciary Committee is taking up this bill now is positive and encouraging. The details still need to be hammered out, but the bill is certainly better than the one that the House Intelligence Committee will be considering this week, which is a non-starter.”

The Freedom Act's Senate sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., hailed the committee breakthrough, but was also circumspect about the changes.