SURVEILLANCE LAWS Obama signs NSA phone-records legislation

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Congress approved sweeping changes Tuesday to surveillance laws enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, eliminating the National Security Agency’s disputed bulk phone-records collection program and replacing it with a more-restrictive measure to keep the records in phone companies’ hands.

Two days after Congress let the phone-records collection and several other anti-terror programs expire, the Senate’s 67-32 vote sent the legislation to President Barack Obama, who signed it Tuesday night.

“This legislation will strengthen civil-liberty safeguards and provide greater public confidence in these programs,” Obama said in a statement. Officials said it could take at least several days to restart the collection.

The legislation will revive most of the programs the Senate had allowed to lapse in a dizzying collision of presidential politics and national security policy. But the authorization will undergo major changes, the legacy of agency contractor Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations two years ago about domestic spying by the government.

In an unusual shifting of alliances, the legislation passed with the support of Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, but over the strong opposition of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell failed to persuade the Senate to extend the current law unchanged, and came up short in a last-ditch effort Tuesday to amend the House version, as nearly a dozen of his own Republicans abandoned him in a series of votes.

The legislation remakes the most-controversial aspect of the USA Patriot Act – the once-secret bulk collection program that allows the National Security Agency to sweep up Americans’ phone records and comb through them for ties to international terrorists.

It also would continue other post-9/11 surveillance provisions that lapsed Sunday night, and which are considered more effective than the phone-data collection program.