House backs limits on NSA spying

WASHINGTON House libertarians and liberals banded together for a surprise win in their fight against the secretive National Security Agency, securing support for new curbs on government spying a year after leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about the bulk collection of millions of Americans' phone records.

The Republican-led House voted 293-123 late Thursday to add the limits to a $570 billion defense spending bill. The provision, which faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, would bar warrantless collection of personal online information and prohibit access for the NSA and CIA into commercial tech products.

Proponents of the measure described them as government "backdoors" that give intelligence agencies an opening to Americans' private data.

"The American people are sick of being spied on," said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who joined with libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats to push the measure.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, railed against "this dragnet spying on millions of Americans."

The House was expected to pass the defense bill Friday. It still must be reconciled with a still-to-be written Senate version.

In the showdown between privacy and security, the House earlier this year overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act that would codify a proposal made in January by President Barack Obama, who said he wanted to end the NSA's practice of collecting and storing the "to and from" records of nearly every American landline telephone call under a program that searched the data for connections to terrorist plots abroad.

Massie, Gabbard and other lawmakers complained that the legislation didn't go far enough, necessitating their amendment to the defense bill. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and other Republican and Democratic leaders pushed back, arguing that the amendment undercut their reform package that was a year in the making.

During hours of debate and votes Thursday, the House also endorsed several new roadblocks to Obama's long-sought effort to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Republicans and some Democrats repeatedly have blocked any effort to shutter the post-Sept. 11 prison to house terror suspects, and congressional furor over Obama's trade last month of five Taliban leaders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl prompted a bipartisan effort to add fresh obstacles.

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House backs limits on NSA spying