[Infowarrior] - House panel strikes deal on surveillance reforms

[Richard Forno]

House panel strikes deal on surveillance reforms

By Katie Bo Williams - 09/12/17 08:31 PM EDT 5

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers have struck a deal on a controversial spy law due to sunset at the end of the year, setting up a fight with the Trump administration over potential limits to the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.

Three key members of the House Judiciary Committee — chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) — have privately agreed to support extending the law through 2023, The New York Times reports.

But as part of that extension, according to congressional officials who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity, the lawmakers have agreed to push for some limits to the law.

Among those limits: Requiring FBI agents to obtain a warrant before sifting through the program’s database of intercepted messages for data about American criminal suspects, a currently permissible practice derided by critics as the so-called “back-door search loophole.”

They also want to prohibit the agency from collecting emails that are about a foreign target but are neither to nor from that person. The NSA voluntarily halted such collection, known as “about” surveillance, earlier this year, but wants to retain the authority to resume it.

The committee is also expected to include a requirement that any executive branch official seeking to “unmask” or reveal the identity of an American citizen in intelligence reports sign a certification avowing that they need the information for a legitimate national security purpose, according to the Times. The identifies are typically hidden to minimize privacy invasions. 

The arrangement is not yet public and is currently being crafted by Judiciary Committee staffers, the newspaper reported.

The Trump administration opposes key details of the arrangement. Earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and National Intelligence Director Dan Coats reiterated the administration's calls for the law to be extended permanently, with no sunset.

“Reauthorizing this critical authority is the top legislative priority of the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community,” they wrote in a Sept. 7 letter to both Republican and Democratic leaders that was made public on Monday.

The key provision of the law — known as Section 702 of a 2008 package of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) —  is aimed at collecting data on foreign spies, terrorists and other targets.

It allows the government to collect the emails and phone calls of foreigners abroad from American internet and phone companies — without individual court orders and even when those foreigners communicate with Americans.

Civil liberties advocates have long pushed for Congress to close the so-called backdoor search loophole allowing federal investigators to sift through Americans’ information that has been “incidentally” caught up in 702 collection.

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http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/350387-house-judiciary-panel-strikes-deal-on-surveillance-reforms