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The NSA Reform Bill the House Passed Today Is a Watered-Down Piece of Nonsense

The USA Freedom Act has been an exercise in time wasting and political grandstanding.
Last fall, people protested NSA mass surveillance in Washington, DC. Image: Jason Koebler

Today, in a closed session of Congress, the House of Representatives passed a completely stripped down version of an NSA reform bill that does essentially nothing to end mass surveillance. The USA Freedom Act is so different from its original iteration, in fact, that those who wrote it didn't even vote for it.

Even after it was watered down in the Judiciary Committee, civil liberty groups still cautiously endorsed the measure. That changed this week, when meddling from the White House completely gutted the rest of it, leading several groups to stop supporting a bill that looked "dramatically different" from one put forward two weeks ago.

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This morning, the House voted 303-121 in favor the the bill. The proceedings were closed, which seems about par for the course for a program whose inner workings are almost entirely opaque.

The specifics of the bill almost don't matter at this point—the USA Freedom Act has enough loopholes and oversights that it functionally changes nothing. If you want the specifics, you can read the many analyses of the language that makes this bill worthless. The entire thing has been an exercise in time-wasting and legislative grandstanding.

How bad is it?

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who helped write the thing, voted against it because it had been changed so much. In a Facebook post this morning, Amash wrote that "this morning's bill contains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program. It claims to end 'bulk collection' of Americans' data only in a very technical sense."

"The bill was so weakened in behind-the-scenes negotiations over the last week that the government still can order—without probable cause—a telephone company to turn over all call records for 'area code 616' or for 'phone calls made east of the Mississippi,' he wrote. "The bill green-lights the government's massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans' records in violation of the Fourth Amendment."

Here's what Trevor Timm, a columnist at the Guardian, and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, had to say about the bill's passage: "It's one thing to pass a weak bill, but it's entirely another to pass off smoke and mirrors as progress."

"It really is astonishing to look at how abruptly this legislation has been warped," Timm wrote. "There's still a chance that the Senate could hold strong and pass the original USA Freedom Act—the one with real transparency and Fisa court reform—then pass it back to the House with an ultimatum."

But even Timm acknowledges that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen. The best that real reformers can hope for at this point is that the bill simply dies in the Senate. Meanwhile, when the Patriot Act expires next year, it could, in effect, end mass surveillance. It's sad that, at this point, it seems that the only way we'll get NSA reform is if Congress continues to do nothing.