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Antenna from an old NSA listening post lies broken and abandoned in Berlin. It was once the most important US vantage point from West Berlin into Iron Curtain communications. Photo: Reuters

US Senate blocks bill to end bulk phone surveillance by NSA

Senate votes against reform to limit monitoring of phone records, with Republicans arguing it would leave nation vulnerable to terrorist plots

AP

The US Senate has blocked a bill to end bulk collection of Americans' phone records by the National Security Agency, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama's primary proposal to rein in domestic surveillance.

The 58-42 vote was two short of the 60 needed to proceed with debate under Senate procedural rules. Voting was largely along party lines, with most Democrats supporting the bill and most Republicans voting against it. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives had previously passed its own NSA bill.

The legislation would have ended the NSA's collection of domestic phone records, instead requiring the agency to obtain a court order each time it wanted to analyse the records in terrorism cases, and query records held by the telephone companies. In many cases the companies store the records for 18 months.

The revelation that the spying agency had been collecting and storing domestic phone records since shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was among the most significant by Edward Snowden, a former NSA operative who turned over secret documents to journalists. The agency collects only so-called metadata - numbers called, not names - and not the content of conversations. But the spectre of the intelligence agency holding domestic phone records was deeply disquieting to many.

The bill had drawn support from technology companies and civil liberties activists. Its failure means there has been little in the way of policy changes as a result of Snowden's disclosures.

Pressured to act, Obama in January proposed curbing the NSA's authority and the House in May passed a bill to do so. While the measure was pending, the NSA continued to collect land line calling records, though the programme does not cover most mobile phone records.

The law authorising the bulk collection, a provision of the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, will expire in June 2015. That means Congress would have to pass legislation re-authorising the programme for it to continue.

For that reason, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, abandoned her previous opposition to the bill. "If we do not pass the bill, we will lose this programme," Feinstein said.

"This bill increases [the] trust and confidence and credibility of our intelligence system," said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

But Senator Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, called the bill "totally flawed" and said the NSA needed the ability to sift through domestic calling records and hold the records. "We have under surveillance any number of Americans who are committed to jihad," Chambliss said.

Current and former intelligence officials disagree about whether the phone record searching is a crucial counterterrorism tool. The US has only been able to point to a single case that came to light exclusively through a search of domestic phone records - an Anaheim, California, taxi driver who was sentenced earlier this year to six years in prison for sending money to Somalia's al-Qaeda affiliate.

Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, expressed disappointment in the Senate's action. "Allowing NSA surveillance to continue unchecked does real harm to Americans," she said. "Constant surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, chills free speech, imperils freedom of the press, and is an affront to the constitution."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Bill to curb NSA spying blocked
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