The Senate blocked legislation that would have limited the National Security Agencys bulk collection of phone records, more than year after Edward Snowden exposed the extent of U.S. government surveillance programs.

Senate leaders failed to get the 60 votes needed to advance the bill yesterday. Its unlikely a new version can be drafted for another vote before the congressional term expires this year.

The bill was an attempt to force spy agencies to collect only information sought through a court order and exclude the use of broad searches like by ZIP codes. A coalition of Internet and technology companies, which include Google Inc. (GOOG) and Twitter Inc. (TWTR), supported the Senate bill while saying the Republican-backed House version passed in May would still allow bulk collection of Internet user data.

The USA Freedom Act eliminates tools critical to the intelligence communitys ability to prevent terrorist attacks, and its adoption would greatly degrade our ability to fight domestic terrorism in particular, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee, said by e-mail.

The Senate, with a Democratic majority, needed to act on the vote now before Republicans, many of whom support government surveillance programs, take control of the Senate in January following key wins in this months elections. Republicans already control the House.

The 58-42 vote to move the measure forward came mostly along party lines.

U.S. Internet and technology companies say theyve already lost contracts with foreign governments over the issue. Forrester Research Inc. (FORR) estimates the backlash against NSA spying could cost as much as $180 billion in lost business. Facebook Inc. (FB), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) are among the companies pushing for limits.

Americans learned of the spying in June 2013 when Snowden, a former NSA contractor revealed a program under which the U.S. uses court orders to compel companies to turn over data about their users. Documents divulged by Snowden also uncovered NSA hacking of fiber-optic cables abroad and installation of surveillance tools into routers, servers and other network equipment.

Apple and Google have retaliated by offering stronger security, including on new smartphones, to automatically shield photos, contact lists and other documents from the government. That, in turn, has heightened tensions with law enforcement agencies that want access to the data for criminal investigations.

The Senate bill, S. 2685, was designed to end one of the NSAs most controversial domestic spy programs, through which it collects and stores the phone records of millions of people not suspected of any wrongdoing. In addition to curbing data collection, the legislation would allow companies to publicly reveal the number and types of orders they receive from the government to hand over user data.

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Senate Blocks Vote on Curbing NSA’s Bulk Data Collection Program

WASHINGTON (AP) - Years before Edward Snowden sparked a public outcry with the disclosure that the National Security Agency had been secretly collecting American telephone records, some NSA executives voiced strong objections to the program, current and former intelligence officials say. The program exceeded the agency's mandate to focus on foreign spying and would do little to stop terror plots, the executives argued.

The 2009 dissent, led by a senior NSA official and embraced by others at the agency, prompted the Obama administration to consider, but ultimately abandon, a plan to stop gathering the records.

The secret internal debate has not been previously reported. The Senate on Tuesday rejected an administration proposal that would have curbed the program and left the records in the hands of telephone companies rather than the government. That would be an arrangement similar to the one the administration quietly rejected in 2009.

The now-retired NSA official, a longtime code-breaker who rose to top management, had just learned in 2009 about the top secret program that was created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He says he argued to then-NSA Director Keith Alexander that storing the calling records of nearly every American fundamentally changed the character of the agency, which is supposed to eavesdrop on foreigners, not Americans.

Alexander politely disagreed, the former official told The Associated Press.

The former official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he didn't have permission to discuss a classified matter, said he knows of no evidence the program was used for anything other than its stated purpose - to hunt for terrorism plots in the U.S. But he said he and others made the case that the collection of American records in bulk crossed a line that he and his colleagues had been taught was sacrosanct.

He said he also warned of a scandal if it should be disclosed that the NSA was storing records of private calls by Americans - to psychiatrists, lovers and suicide hotlines, among other contacts.

Alexander, who led the NSA from 2005 until he retired last year, did not dispute the former official's account, though he said he disagreed that the program was improper.

"An individual did bring us these questions, and he had some great points," Alexander told the AP. "I asked the technical folks, including him, to look at it."

By 2009, several former officials said, concern about the "215 program," so-called for the authorizing provision of the USA Patriot Act, had grown inside NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters to the point that the program's intelligence value was being questioned. That was partly true because, for technical and other reasons, the NSA was not capturing most mobile calling records, which were an increasing share of the domestic calling universe, the former officials said.

Originally posted here:
AP Exclusive: Before Snowden, a debate inside NSA over telephone records

WASHINGTON (AP) Years before Edward Snowden sparked a public outcry with the disclosure that the National Security Agency had been secretly collecting American telephone records, some NSA executives voiced strong objections to the program, current and former intelligence officials say. The program exceeded the agencys mandate to focus on foreign spying and would do little to stop terror plots, the executives argued.

The 2009 dissent, led by a senior NSA official and embraced by others at the agency, prompted the Obama administration to consider, but ultimately abandon, a plan to stop gathering the records.

The secret internal debate has not been previously reported. The Senate on Tuesday rejected an administration proposal that would have curbed the program and left the records in the hands of telephone companies rather than the government. That would be an arrangement similar to the one the administration quietly rejected in 2009.

The now-retired NSA official, a longtime code-breaker who rose to top management, had just learned in 2009 about the top secret program that was created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He says he argued to then-NSA Director Keith Alexander that storing the calling records of nearly every American fundamentally changed the character of the agency, which is supposed to eavesdrop on foreigners, not Americans.

Alexander politely disagreed, the former official told The Associated Press.

The former official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he didnt have permission to discuss a classified matter, said he knows of no evidence the program was used for anything other than its stated purpose - to hunt for terrorism plots in the U.S. But he said he and others made the case that the collection of American records in bulk crossed a line that he and his colleagues had been taught was sacrosanct.

He said he also warned of a scandal if it should be disclosed that the NSA was storing records of private calls by Americans - to psychiatrists, lovers and suicide hotlines among other contacts.

Alexander, who led the NSA from 2005 until he retired last year, did not dispute the former officials account, though he said he disagreed that the program was improper.

An individual did bring us these questions, and he had some great points, Alexander told the AP. I asked the technical folks, including him, to look at it,

By 2009, several former officials said, concern about the 215 program, so-called for the authorizing provision of the USA Patriot Act, had grown inside NSAs Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters to the point that the programs intelligence value was being questioned. That was partly true because, for technical and other reasons, NSA was not capturing most mobile calling records, which were an increasing share of the domestic calling universe, the former officials said.

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Before Snowden, a debate inside NSA

Condensed, the story of Edward Snowden and his trove of top-secret NSA documents has plenty of potboiler elements: exotic locales, international journalists, code names and secret signals transmitted via Rubik's Cube. All true, but Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour adopts a more serious, and one might say, less exciting, fly-on-the-wall approach.

Filmmaker Poitras was among those Snowden (a.k.a. "citizenfour") originally contacted, and it's she and journalist Glenn Greenwald who meet up with Snowden in Hong Kong to look at the documents and lay out a strategy for publicizing them. This comprises the bulk of the film.

The more interesting segments involve Snowden discussing the hows and whys of his high-risk behavior. He's keenly aware of the consequences "I already know how this will end for me" and later is explicit about his public role: "I don't want to hide on this. It's powerful to come out and say I'm not afraid."

One of the films' better points winds up being buried in asides and the odds and ends of other material Poitras mixes in, from Occupy to quick visits to newsrooms: that, as Snowden feared, the story quickly became about him, and not about what troubling information the documents revealed. And indeed, we now still wonder more about how Snowden is faring in Russia, than what the government is doing with it secret data collection. An irony unsolved by either Snowden's brazen act, or this film's recap of that week in a Hong Kong hotel room.

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Citizenfour