After failing to pass NSA reform last year, Congress has less than 100 days left to try again, or allow the entire phone metadata program to sunset without reauthorization on June 1.
The political nature of this timeline is how NSA reform collapsed in the first place, with pro-reform lawmakers unable to agree on a strategy: wait out the expiration for larger reforms, or advance with more easily attainable small concessions by using the sunset date as a bargaining chip.
Sen. Rand Paul, a vocal NSA opponent, fell into the former camp, encouraging the sunset and refusing to back small reforms in the bill if it entailed reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
The reform bill, the USA Freedom Act, ultimately failed to pass by just two votes. At the time Paul said he “felt bad,” since “They probably needed my vote.” The Obama administration had approved the bill’s reforms, hoping to avoid the program’s expiration.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a frequent privacy advocate, told National Journal he’s still hopeful they can pass reform. “I can tell you it wasn’t very long ago—in this room, the handful of people who were for this were talking [and] we joked we could meet in a phone booth,” he said. “We went back over the votes and we had a handful, and we got up to the point a couple summers ago where we had maybe 20 write a letter expressing concern, and now we got close.”
Should the program now sunset without an agreement, officials reportedly have no backup plan.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has already made clear that he will blame Congress should anything go wrong with reauthorization. “If that tool is taken away from us … and some untoward incident happens that could have been thwarted if we had had it, I hope that everyone involved in that decision assumes the responsibility and it not be blamed, if we have another failure, exclusively on the intelligence community,” he said Monday.
Meanwhile, NSA advocates like Marco Rubio would prefer to permanently enshrine NSA provisions into law.
