White House endorses passage of USA Freedom Act

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The White House formally threw its support behind the USA Freedom Act Tuesday, fully endorsing a plan to end the government's bulk collection of personal data and replace it with a more tailored program that would allow phone companies to do the collection instead.

The bill, which the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on this week, "strikes an appropriate balance between significant reform and preservation of important national security tools," the White House said in a formal statement of administration policy issued by the Office of Management and Budget.

The White House had previously given more tentative support to the proposal, endorsing the framework but not committing to President Obama's signature on the bill.

But last week's appeals court ruling finding the existing program illegal gave more impetus to the overhaul. Without it, the electronic surveillance provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act would expire.

In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released classified documents disclosing the existence of a vast program to track data about American's phone calls and e-mails.

Obama had urged Congress to scrap that program and replace it with something else. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee passed a plan that would require telecommunications companies to keep the data, allowing government access to it through an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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