[governance] House Defeats Effort to Rein In N.S.A. Data Gathering

[Diego Rafael Canabarro]

House Defeats Effort to Rein In N.S.A. Data Gathering By JONATHAN
WEISMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jonathan_weisman/index.html>
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/politics/house-defeats-effort-to-rein-in-nsa-data-gathering.html?_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&adxnnl=1&emc=edit_th_20130725&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1374757527-4jpgYHFpcRmXDYkOgVS/ag

WASHINGTON — A deeply divided House defeated legislation Wednesday that
would have blocked the National Security
Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
from
collecting vast amounts of phone records, handing the Obama administration
a hard-fought victory in the first Congressional showdown over the N.S.A.’s
surveillance activities since Edward J. Snowden’s security breaches last
month.

The 205-to-217 vote was far closer than expected and came after a brief but
impassioned debate over citizens’ right to privacy and the steps the
government must take to protect national security. It was a rare instance
in which a classified intelligence program was openly discussed on the
House floor, and disagreements over the  program led to some unusual
coalitions.

Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration
abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive
intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the
House Republican leadership to try to block it.

House members pressing to rein in the N.S.A. vowed afterward that the
outrage unleashed by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures would eventually put a brake
on the agency’s activities. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New
York and a longtime critic of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, said
lawmakers would keep coming back with legislation to curtail the dragnets
for “metadata,” whether through phone records or Internet surveillance.

At the very least, the section of the Patriot
Act<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
in
question will be allowed to expire in 2015, he said. “It’s going to end —
now or later,” Mr. Nadler said. “The only question is when and on what
terms.”

Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, promised lawmakers that he would draft legislation
this fall to add more privacy protections to government surveillance
programs even as he begged the House to oppose blanket restrictions.

The amendment to the annual Defense Department spending bill, written by
Representatives Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican from Western
Michigan, and John Conyers Jr., a veteran liberal Democrat from Detroit,
turned Democrat against Democrat and Republican against Republican.

It would have limited N.S.A. phone surveillance to specific targets of law
enforcement investigations, not broad dragnets. It was only one of a series
of proposals — including restricting funds for Syrian rebels and adding
Congressional oversight to foreign aid to Egypt — intended to check President
Obama<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s
foreign and intelligence policies.

But in the phone surveillance program, the House’s right and left wings
appeared to find a unifying cause. Representative Raúl R. Labrador,
Republican of Idaho, called it “the wing nut coalition” and Mr. Amash “the
chief wing nut.”

Mr. Amash framed his push as a defense of the Fourth Amendment’s
prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, and he found a
surprising ally, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of
Wisconsin and one of the principal authors of the Patriot Act. Mr.
Sensenbrenner said his handiwork was never meant to create a program that
allows the government to demand the phone records of every American.

“The time has come to stop it,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

Opposing them were not only Mr. Obama and the House speaker, John A.
Boehner of Ohio, but also the leaders of the nation’s defense and
intelligence establishment.

On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith
Alexander, spent hours providing classified briefings to lawmakers about
the program, and the White House took the unusual step of issuing a
statement urging lawmakers not to approve the measure. On Wednesday, James
L. Jones, the retired Marine Corps general who was Mr. Obama’s national
security adviser from 2009-10, added his name to an open letter in support
of preserving the N.S.A.
programs<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/739551-letter-of-support-for-nsa-programs-july-24-2013.html>
that
more than half a dozen top national-security officials from the Bush
administration had signed.

“Denying the N.S.A. such access to data will leave the nation at risk,”
said the letter, which was circulated to undecided members.

Mr. Rogers took a personal swipe at Mr. Amash, a darling of social media,
when he said the House was not in the business of racking up “likes” on
Facebook. He said the calling log program was an important tool for
protecting against terrorist attacks.

“This is not a game,” he fumed. “This is real. It will have real
consequences.”

But many rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats appeared impervious to
such overtures. Representative Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado and a
supporter of the amendment, said that if the Obama administration felt
strongly about defending the program, Mr. Obama would have spoken out
personally. Instead, the White House released a statement under the name of
the press secretary, Jay Carney.

“The press secretary says hundreds of things every day,” Mr. Polis said.

The divisions in Congress seemed to reflect the ambivalence in the nation.
In a CBS News poll released Wednesday, 67 percent of Americans said the
government’s collection of phone records was a violation of privacy. At the
same time, 52 percent called it a necessary tool to help find terrorists.

But the final tally in the House suggested the tide was shifting on the
issue. In the weeks after the Snowden leaks, the united voices of
Congressional leaders and administration officials in support of the N.S.A.
programs seemed to squelch the outrage Mr. Snowden had hoped for. Anger
seemed to be trained more on Mr. Snowden than on the programs he revealed.

As the news media and the government chronicled Mr. Snowden’s flight from
law enforcement, a web of privacy activists, libertarian conservatives and
liberal civil liberties proponents rallied support behind Congressional
action. House members said they received hundreds of phone calls and
e-mails before Wednesday’s vote, all in favor of curtailing the N.S.A.’s
authority.

Ultimately, 94 House Republicans defied their leadership; 111 Democrats — a
majority of the Democratic caucus — defied their president.

“This is only the beginning,” Mr. Conyers vowed after the vote. The fight
will shift to the Senate, where two longtime Democratic critics of N.S.A.
surveillance, Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon, immediately
took up the cause.

“National security is of paramount importance, yet the N.S.A.’s dragnet
collection of Americans’ phone records violates innocent Americans’ privacy
rights and should not continue as its exists today,” Mr. Udall said after
the vote. “The U.S. House of
Representatives<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/house_of_representatives/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’
bipartisan vote today proposal should be a wake-up call for the White
House.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

-- 
Diego R. Canabarro
http://lattes.cnpq.br/4980585945314597

--
diego.canabarro [at] ufrgs.br
diego [at] pubpol.umass.edu
MSN: diegocanabarro [at] gmail.com
Skype: diegocanabarro
Cell # +55-51-9244-3425 (Brasil) / +1-413-362-0133 (USA)
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