President Obama, who committed to making “concrete and substantial” reforms to the National Security Agency nearly a year ago, has now overseen his administration’s fourth extension of the NSA’s bulk phone data collection.
The announcement of the extension came Monday from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Attorney General. The Senate recently failed to move forward with a bill that would have made modest reforms to the data program and reauthorized several provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire in 2015.
And since we all know that the president hates acting without Congress, the memo continues: “Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program, as modified by the changes the President directed in January. “
The program is now authorized through February 27, 2015.
The failed Senate bill, the USA Freedom Act, would have ended the mass data collection program and required the NSA to seek the records from phone companies with a court order. It failed to move forward by just two votes, and was opposed by Sen. Rand Paul because of the provisions of the Patriot Act it extended. Most privacy advocates supported the bill as an incremental, although inadequate, improvement.
After the bill died, cosponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) urged President Obama to instead use his authority to end the bulk data collection.
“The President can end the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records once and for all by not seeking reauthorization of this program by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] Court, and once again, I urge him to do just that,” the senator said in a statement. “Doing so would not be a substitute for comprehensive surveillance reform legislation — but it would be an important first step.”
