Either way, no more collection of phone records

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

However Congress resolves its impasse over government surveillance, this much is clear: The National Security Agency ultimately will be out of the business of collecting and storing Americans’ calling records.

Aiming for passage this afternoon, the Senate on Monday prepared to make modest changes to a House bill that would end the collection while preserving other surveillance authorities. But while Congress debated, the law authorizing the collection expired at midnight Sunday.

The NSA had stopped gathering the records from phone companies hours before the deadline. And other post-9/11 surveillance provisions considered more effective than the phone-call collection program also lapsed, leading intelligence officials to warn of critical gaps.

The legislation now before the Senate, known as the USA Freedom Act, would reauthorize the surveillance but would phase out NSA phone-records collection over time. It passed the House overwhelmingly and is backed by President Barack Obama. Sen. Rand Paul, who doesn’t believe it goes far enough in restricting the government, objected anew Monday, but he can’t stop a vote to end debate scheduled for this morning.

If the bill becomes law over the next few days, the NSA will resume gathering the phone records but only for a transition period of six months, in the House version, or a year in the Senate version.

If the bill fails amid congressional politics, the collection cannot resume, period.

The turn of events is a victory for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who disclosed the phone- records collection in 2013. Senators on the intelligence committee had been issuing veiled and vague warnings about the program for years, saying if Americans only knew how the Patriot Act was being interpreted, they would be outraged. But it was Snowden who revealed the details.

Still, the current legislation hardly would count as a defeat for the NSA, Snowden’s former employer. Agency officials, including former Director Keith Alexander, long have said they had no problem with ending their collection of phone records, as long as they could continue to search the data held by the phone companies, which the legislation allows them to do.