The Senate Intelligence Committee has passed a bill which would allow the National Security Agency to continue to collect Americans’ phone records and track foreign nationals who enter the US.
In a closed session on Thursday, the committee voted 11-4 for the bill which would codify the US spy agency’s collection of Americans’ phone call records into law.
The bill, which now awaits a full Senate vote, was sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It lets the NSA continue to gather phone records of millions of Americans for renewable 90-day periods and authorizes the US government to retain the data.
The bill also allows the US spy agency to eavesdrop on the cellphones of foreign nationals who enter the US “for a transitory period not to exceed 72 hours.”
The bill only approves a measure that puts new limits on what intelligence agencies can do with communications records. The measure also puts a five-year limit on how long the information can be retained.
“The NSA’s invasive surveillance of Americans’ private information does not respect our constitutional values and needs fundamental reform, not incidental changes. Unfortunately, the bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee does not go far enough to address the NSA’s overreaching domestic surveillance programs,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), a critic of the NSA’s spying activities.
Since early June, documents disclosed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have blown the lid on a number of US spying programs including one for collecting Americans’ phone records and another, codenamed PRISM, for tracking the use of US-based Internet servers by all people around the world.
Based on documents obtained from Snowden, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the NSA even infiltrates the main communication links that connect Yahoo and Google’s data centers outside the US.
Other recent revelations have also shown that the US has been monitoring phone calls of at least 35 world leaders including some of its closest allies in Europe like German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Source: Press TV