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NSA surveillance program gets 3 more months

The controversial National Security Agency program that gathers information on telephone calls made by millions of Americans has been extended for nearly three additional months, the Obama administration announced Friday afternoon.

President Barack Obama has endorsed storing some of the so-called metadata with telephone companies instead of the NSA and querying it on a case-by-case basis when needed for terrorism investigations. Legislation to facilitate that approach passed the House in May, but the Senate is still studying the issue.

"Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program, as modified by the changes the President announced earlier this year," the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement.

The reauthorization was approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Thursday and will run through September 12, the statement said.

Earlier Friday, three Democratic senators encouraged Obama to abandon the program altogether while Congress works on reforms. Existing authorities would allow Obama to create a stop-gap system that doesn't require keeping a huge trove of phone data.

"More comprehensive Congressional action is vital, but the executive branch need not wait for Congress to end the dragnet collection of millions of Americans' phone records," Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico wrote in a letter to the president. "We believe the way to restore Americans' constitutional rights and their trust in our intelligence community is to immediately end the practice of vacuuming up the phone records of huge numbers of innocent Americans every day and permit the government to obtain only the phone records of people actually connected to terrorism or other nefarious activity."

Some senators and many in the tech community believe the bill passed by the House does not contain enough safeguards and does contain loopholes that could be abused by the government. In addition, there are signs that rank-and-file House members may favor more sweeping surveillance changes than those imposed by the bill approved last month.

Just Thursday, the House voted overwhelmingly in favor of an appropriations rider that would rein in the NSA's ability to use the names and identities of Americans to search web data collected from accounts of foreign targets.