Congress to Introduce Last-Ditch Bill to Reform NSA Spying

Backed up against a rapidly approaching do-or-die deadline, bipartisan lawmakers are poised to introduce legislation that would roll back the National Security Agency's expansive surveillance powers. Apparently, the legislation could land as soon as April 21 in the House. The bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, would effectively end the NSA's bulk collection of US phone metadata -- the numbers, time stamps, and duration of a call but not its actual content -- by instead relying on phone companies to retain that data. The program is the first and one of the most controversial spying programs exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks that began nearly two years ago.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) are expected to back the bill, as is Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the author of the original Freedom Act that first emerged in the fall of 2013, and Rep Jerry Nadler (D-NY). All four have been intensely involved in negotiations since the measure fell apart in Congress late in 2014. But as the House barrels ahead, it remains unclear what strategy the bill's advocates in the Senate, led chiefly by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), intend to deploy. That question is complicated by the implications a fractious national security debate could have for the Republican caucus, whose three presidential aspirants -- Sens Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- have adopted increasingly divergent positions on NSA surveillance. Whatever the strategy, lawmakers in both chambers need to move quickly, since the bill's introduction arrives as the window of opportunity for reforming the nation's surveillance activities is rapidly closing. Core provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act are due to sunset on June 1, including the controversial Section 215, which the NSA uses to authorize its dragnet surveillance of Americans' call data. The Freedom Act would reauthorize these authorities, preserving expiring capabilities the intelligence community has said are vital to national security while ushering in more strident privacy protections and transparency requirements.