Senate and House Bills Would Effectively End NSA Mass Surveillance

Bipartisan lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are introducing mirror legislation on Tuesday that would roll back a cornerstone of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance authority, congressional staffers close to the negotiations say.

The bills would effectively end the spy agency's bulk collection of U.S. phone records, the first and one of the most controversial programs exposed by Edward Snowden nearly two years ago.

Intelligence agencies would instead be allowed to request call metadata—the numbers, time stamps, and duration of a call but not its content—from phone companies on an as-needed basis after obtaining judicial approval.

The bills are the result of months of bipartisan negotiations and arrive in the face of a looming June 1 sunset of three core provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act, including Section 215, which the NSA uses to justify its bulk collection of domestic call records.

That deadline has instilled a dire sense of urgency in pro-reform lawmakers, staffers and privacy advocates, many of whom believe it is unlikely substantial surveillance reform can be enacted without negotiators being under the pressure of a ticking clock.

The Senate bill's lead sponsors are Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Mike Lee, a tea-party Republican from Utah. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is said to not be an original cosponsor of the measure, despite his office being deeply engaged in weeks of negotiations regarding NSA reform.

The introduction of a Senate bill Tuesday was largely seen as unexpected, as it appeared the chamber would not go forward with its own legislation without Grassley on board and would instead opt to wait for the House to act.

But that plan appears to have been scuttled amid continued delays over the past two weeks and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's sudden and surprising introduction last week of a fast-track bill that would grant a clean reauthorization of the Patriot Act's expiring provisions until December 2020, thus preserving the NSA dragnet.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, ranking member John Conyers, and Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Jim Sensenbrenner—the original author of the Patriot Act—are all original cosponsors of the House version. A House Judiciary aide said the panel intends to vote on the bill this Thursday at 10 a.m.

"If enacted, our bill will be the most significant reform to government surveillance authorities since the USA Patriot Act was passed nearly 14 years ago," Leahy said in a statement provided to National Journal. "Most importantly, our bill will definitively end the NSA's bulk collection program under Section 215. The USA Freedom Act is a path forward that has the support of the administration, privacy groups, the technology industry – and most importantly, the American people."

In addition to ending the government's bulk phone grabs, the bill would allow U.S. tech firms like Google and Facebook to disclose more information about government data requests made via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to a fact sheet that circulated among lawmakers last week. It would additionally would give these companies more flexibility in how they can respond to national security orders. 

Several national-security provisions unrelated to mass surveillance have been tacked on to the bill in a bid to cajole the House and Senate intelligence committees to be more supportive of the legislation. One such provision would allow for foreign surveillance of a target who relocates to the U.S. to continue for up to 72 hours under limited circumstances to prevent intelligence agencies from "going dark" on surveillance as they seek approval for a domestic warrant.

Another change would increases the maximum penalty for those who offer material support to terrorism from 15 to 20 years. Privacy advocates briefed on the legislation have suggested the new additions are something they will oppose.

An earlier version of the Freedom Act overwhelmingly passed the House last year before a repurposed version of the bill fell two votes short of advancing in the lame-duck Senate.

This story is breaking and will be updated.