The amended bill also removed a provision banning the so-called reverse targeting of US persons by accessing their communications through a legal surveillance target, and it limited the amount of reporting that telecom and Internet companies can publish about surveillance requests they receive, critics said.
Supporters of the bill noted it would require the NSA to issue a classified report to Congress within a day of making significant changes to its collection program and issue a public report within 45 days. “In this country, there should be no such thing as secret law,” said Representative John Conyers, Michigan Democrat.
The bill’s requirement that the surveillance court publish its major findings, and its provision allowing the court to call upon privacy advocates and other experts when examining surveillance requests will also limit over-expansive surveillance programs, supporters said.
However, critics of the changes to the specific selection-term definition are correct in saying the new language is not as “clean or straightforward” as the old version’s language, Conyers acknowledged.
“Nothing in the [new] definition explicitly prohibits the government from using a very broad selection term like, ‘area code 202’ or the entire Eastern seaboard,” he said. “But that concern is largely theoretical; that type of collection is not likely to be of use to the government.”
Conyers didn’t explain why the NSA has believed, up to this point, that collecting all phone records across the US is useful.
Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, called on Congress to require the NSA to get a court-ordered search warrant, with evidence of probable cause of a crime, before collecting phone records.
When Goodlatte noted that US agencies have never needed a search warrant for phone records because they aren’t considered personal records, Holt disagreed. “Is there any American who doesn’t think this is a search?” he said.
Grant Gross, IDG News Service
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