NSA reform measures quietly included in $1.1tn spending bill

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/nsa-reform-included-spending-bill-passes-house

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Congress is calling on the National Security Agency to detail the effectiveness of its bulk data collection programmes and will outlaw certain types of domestic surveillance, using two little-noticed clauses included in its giant federal spending bill.

The $1.1tn budget bill passed the House of Representatives Wednesday afternoon by 359-67 votes and is expected to become law after clearing the Senate as soon as Friday.

But in a sign of pent-up reform pressure on Capitol Hill, two measures dealing with the NSA were quietly included in the 1,600-page spending text with relatively little fanfare – or opposition from the White House – and are likely to pave the way for more binding legislative efforts once President Barack Obama outlines his own response to the surveillance scandal on Friday.

The first, and more unexpected, of the two NSA budget measures directs the agency to reveal “the number of records acquired by the NSA as part of its bulk telephone metadata program” over a five-year period, and to turn the data over to the House and Senate judiciary committees within 90 days.

“This report shall provide, to the greatest extent possible, an estimate of the number of records of United States citizens that have been acquired by NSA as part of the bulk telephone metadata program and the number of such records that have been reviewed by NSA personnel in response to a query,” it demands.

It is also calls for more information on the vexed question of how helpful such metadata has been in foiling terror plots, something that both NSA critics and Obama's own review panel say has been greatly exaggerated.

The report should be “unclassified to the greatest extent possible and with a classified annex if necessary, listing terrorist activities that were disrupted, in whole or in part, with the aid of information obtained through NSA's telephone metadata program and whether this information could have been promptly obtained by other means”, says the budget text.

However, the demand for fresh NSA disclosure is contained in an introduction to the budget bill rather than the main text of the legislation and, according to congressional staff, is thought likely to have an advisory effect rather than carry the full weight of law.

A separate NSA reform measure dealing with domestic surveillance is included in the main legislation text, and would carry more power to compel the NSA.

It bars the agency from using any of the funding it gets from Congress to target US citizens for surveillance under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The measure was first introduced into a defence spending bill by congressman Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Republican, in June, as part of the initial response to the revelations of domestic data collection that came out of documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

It was intended, however, as a response to more radical reforms proposed by congressman Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan, and is likely to have relatively limited impact on the NSA's ability to collect data on US citizens through incidental means, the so-called backdoor provisions, which was seen as a bigger threat as Snowden's revelations continued.

Some reformers in Congress were therefore concerned that inclusion of the clause in the spending bill could serve as a distraction, although one staffer involved in separate reform legislation said it was “helpful to keep the pressure up”.

Asked about the budget provisions on Tuesday, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said he was not aware of them, but the White House later issued a letter urging passage of the spending bill and said the president would sign it into law.

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