[Infowarrior] - GOP chairman backs collection of phone data

[Richard Forno]

GOP chairman backs collection of phone data
By Mario Trujillo - 01/13/15 10:53 AM EST

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/229319-house-intel-chair-plans-work-to-reauthorize-phone-record-collection

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is pushing lawmakers to reauthorize the government collection of Americans’ telephone records before the authority expires this summer. 

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) also said there is no need to make reforms to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has approved the data collection numerous times. 

“We don’t want to further encumber intelligence and law enforcement communities who already have a difficult task in tracking those who wish to attack Americans at home and abroad,” he told Bloomberg News in a written statement in response to a series of questions.

A key section of the Patriot Act is set to expire later this year. Advocates see the deadline as an opportunity to push reforms to the program that authorizes the National Security Agency's collection of Americans’ telephone metadata — the call times, numbers and durations, but not the content. 

Nunes said he plans to talk to lawmakers about the program and provide freshman lawmakers with top-secret briefings on the authorization.

“These are key terrorist tracking programs that should be reauthorized,” he said.  

Legislation that would have ended the government’s bulk collection of data and added a special privacy advocate to the FISA court failed in the Senate last year. The House approved a version of the bill, but civil liberties advocates and technology companies opposed it, arguing the reforms did not go far enough. 

Nunes said a lot of the opposition to the program stems from misunderstanding. But he disagreed that the government should have provided a public outline of the collection before details of it leaked from documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 

Other intelligence programs should also be kept secret, he said, arguing the leaks have done damage to intelligence gathering. 

“Spies can’t be effective spies if you tell everybody they’re spies," he said.
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