[Infowarrior] - House Votes to Renew Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Limits

[Richard Forno]

House Votes to Renew Surveillance Law, Rejecting New Privacy Limits
By Charlie Savage, Eileen Sullivan and Nicholas Fandos

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/us/politics/fisa-surveillance-congress-trump.html

Jan. 11, 2018

WASHINGTON — A yearslong effort by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant new privacy limits on the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program fell short on Thursday, as the House of Representatives voted to extend the legal basis for that program by six years with only minimal changes.

The vote, 256 to 164, centered on an expiring law, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which permits the government to collect without a warrant from American firms, like Google and AT&T, the emails and other communications of foreigners abroad — even when they are talking to Americans.

Before approving the extension of the law, the House voted 233 to 183 to reject an amendment that proposed a series of overhauls. Among them was a requirement that officials get warrants in most cases before hunting for and reading emails and other messages of Americans swept up under the program.

The legislation still has to go through the Senate. But fewer lawmakers there appear to favor major changes to spying laws, so the House vote is likely the effective end of a debate over 21st-century surveillance technology and privacy rights that broke out in 2013 following the leaks  by the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Congress did, in 2015, vote to end and replace a program that Mr. Snowden exposed under which the N.S.A., under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, had been secretly collecting logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk. But lawmakers who favored extending that overhaul to the warrantless surveillance program fell short in adding to that feat.

The vote on Thursday was a victory for the Trump administration and the intelligence community, which opposed imposing major new curbs on the program, and for Republican leadership, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who had blocked the House from an opportunity to consider a less-sweeping compromise package developed by the House Judiciary Committee. They gambled that faced with an all-or-essentially-nothing choice, a majority of lawmakers would choose the status quo — and won.

Earlier on Thursday, President Trump contradicted his own White House and top national security officials in a Twitter post that criticized an important surveillance law just as Congress began debating whether to approve it. But less than two hours later, the president appeared to reverse himself, telling lawmakers to “Get smart!”

Mr. Trump’s first tweet on the topic appeared to encourage lawmakers to support limiting the law.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/951431836030459905

He was referring to an explosive and largely uncorroborated dossier that details claims about ties between Russia and Mr. Trump and his aides.

The tweet enraged Republican leaders on Capitol Hill who have been trying to chart a course to renew it, more or less intact. Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Mr. Trump spoke by phone between the president’s two tweets, according to a senior Republican congressional aide.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, asked Mr. Ryan to pull the bill from consideration, according to a senior Democratic aide familiar with the request. But Republicans, battling a last-minute push from conservative lawmakers, gambled on moving forward with a vote.

Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate had counted on enough moderate Democrats and Republicans to stick together to extend the legal basis for the surveillance program, with only minimal changes. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, was spotted in a House cloakroom talking to members before the vote in a last-minute lobbying push.

https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/status/951492396633780224

Mr. Trump, who is known to watch Fox News while he is tweeting, posted his tweet shortly after a Fox News legal analyst appealed directly to the president during a Thursday morning segment about the coming House vote. The analyst, Andrew Napolitano, turned to television cameras and said, “Mr. President, this is not the way to go.” He added that Mr. Trump’s “woes” began with surveillance.

By midmorning, in a follow-up tweet, the president appeared to step back from supporting the limits that his own administration has been encouraging lawmakers to reject.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/951457382651056128