NSA and FBI fight to retain spy powers as surveillance law nears expiration

On 1 June, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits US law enforcement and surveillance agencies to collect business records, expires.

Yet with Section 215’s lifespan now stretching to a matter of weeks, supporters of broad surveillance powers have yet to put forth a bill for their preservation – evidence, opponents believe, that the votes for reauthorization do not exist, particularly not in the House of Representatives.

Members of the intelligence and judiciary committees in both chambers are still negotiating behind closed doors to determine the shape of a vehicle to reauthorize 215. A spokeswoman for Senator Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who leads the Senate intelligence committee, had no information to offer on Tuesday. Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, left an afternoon intelligence committee meeting saying the shape of a reauthorization was under “ongoing discussion”.

A different congressional source said Senate GOP leadership was “clinging to the pipe dream” of a straight reauthorization.

More likely, according to a multiple Hill sources, is a different option under consideration: making the major NSA reform bill of the last Congress the point of departure for reauthorizing 215 in the current one.

That bill, the USA Freedom Act, passed the House in May 2014 before narrowly failing in November in the Senate. Belatedly, the White House endorsed it, after seeing it had a greater chance of passage than any pro-NSA alternative. Yet the House version lost substantial civil-libertarian support after the intelligence agencies and House leadership weakened its surveillance restrictions, including its central prohibition on the bulk collection of domestic phone records.

The revived bill would extend the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act for a still-undetermined number of years – essentially staking out the center of the 2015-era surveillance debate for a bill that would take NSA out of the domestic bulk-collection business.

Section 215 is the authority claimed by the NSA since 2006 for its ongoing daily bulk collection of US phone records revealed by the  whistleblower Edward Snowden. While the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies last year supported divesting the NSA of its domestic phone metadata collection, a bill to do so failed in November.