Senate approves USA Freedom Act

Erin Kelly | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Senate passes USA Freedom Act The Senate overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to end the National Security Agency's controversial bulk collection of the phone data of millions of Americans who have no ties to terrorism.



WASHINGTON — The Senate overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to end the National Security Agency's controversial bulk collection of the phone data of millions of Americans who have no ties to terrorism.

Senators by a 67 to 32 margin approved the USA Freedom Act, which was passed by the House last month. President Obama signed the bill Tuesday night.

Three key sections of the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law that expired at midnight Sunday will now be restored and extended through 2019.

However, Section 215 of that law will be changed to stop the NSA from continuing its mass phone data collection program. Instead, phone companies will retain the data and the NSA can obtain information about targeted individuals with permission from a federal court.

The Senate's hard-fought passage of the USA Freedom Act represented a major victory for privacy rights advocates in Congress. It also highlighted the upper hand those advocates now have in the GOP over traditional defense hawks such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had fought to renew the Patriot Act without changes.

"I cannot support passage of the so-called USA Freedom Act," McConnell said after conceding Tuesday that he would lose the vote to the bill's supporters. "It does not enhance the privacy protections of American citizens. And it surely undermines American security by taking one more tool from our warfighters at exactly the wrong time."

But McConnell was outnumbered by a coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans who wanted to rein in what they saw as an abuse of the government's surveillance power. Many lawmakers said they were shocked when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the NSA's bulk collection program in 2013.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said the USA Freedom Act protects national security while respecting Americans' privacy rights.

"The American people intuitively understand that it's nobody's business who they are calling," said Lee, who led efforts to pass the USA Freedom Act along with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Leahy, Lee and other critics of the NSA program beat back attempts by McConnell and Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., to amend the USA Freedom Act. Any change to the bill would have required it to go back to the House for approval, and it appeared unlikely that House members would have agreed to the now-failed amendments.

The proposed amendments included extending the period for the bulk phone collection program to wind down from six months to 12 months to give the NSA and phone companies more time to switch over the data collection to the phone companies. Another amendment would have required telecommunications companies to give Congress six months' notice if they intended to change their data retention procedures. A separate change would have required the director of national intelligence to certify that the new data retention process was working.

McConnell said the proposed changes were "modest safeguards" designed to make the revised Patriot Act work better.

"Before scrapping an effective system that has helped protect us from attack in favor of an untried one, we should at least work toward securing some modest degree of assurance that the new system can, in fact, actually work," he said.

Critics — including bipartisan leaders of the House Judiciary Committee — said the changes would weaken the bill and undermine support by privacy rights groups.

"Let us have no more unnecessary delay or political brinksmanship," said Leahy, who has been trying to pass the USA Freedom Act for two years. "It is time to do our jobs for the American people — to protect their privacy and maintain our national security."

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill's passage "is a milestone."

"This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director. "It's a testament to the significance of the Snowden disclosures and also to the hard work of many principled legislators on both sides of the aisle."

But Jaffer said the bill still leaves too many of the government's overbroad surveillance powers in place.

"The passage of this bill is an indication that comprehensive reform is possible, but it is not comprehensive reform in itself," Jaffer said.



The Computer & Communications Industry Association applauded the bill's passage. The U.S. tech industry has pushed for reform out of concern that consumers worldwide won't buy American electronics and Internet services if they believe the U.S. government is spying on them.

"Today's vote is a tangible victory for citizens around the world, and a step toward restoring trust in the U.S. government and the ability of lawmakers to do what is right in the face of tremendous political pressure," said Ed Black, the group's president and CEO. "It also begins the process of rebuilding the confidence of Internet users worldwide in American providers of digital services."

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