Extension of warrantless NSA spying, with bipartisan support, heads to Trump for signature
By
Fred Mazelis
20 January 2018
The US Senate voted yesterday by a large margin, as expected, for a six-year extension of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, which had first been exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. The Senate action, following its passage in the House of Representatives the previous Thursday, sends the bill to President Donald Trump for his signature.
In both houses of Congress, the extension of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act received strong bipartisan support. In the House, 55 Democrats joined 178 Republicans in voting down an amendment that would have placed some restrictions on spying by requiring that a warrant be obtained for US resident records swept up in mass surveillance. On the final vote, 65 Democrats supported the warrantless spying in the House, and the bill passed by the lopsided margin of 256 to 164.
In the Senate, passage was signaled on Tuesday, when 19 Democrats joined with 41 Republicans to approve a procedural maneuver proposed by the Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell’s move prevented amendments such as the one voted down by the House the previous week from being brought to a vote in the upper chamber of Congress. Two days later, the Senate passed the bill by 65-34, a margin of almost 2-1, again with bipartisan support.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was first enacted in 1978, in the wake of the exposure of CIA abuses and illegal spying under the Nixon Administration. It created a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which, while almost always approving warrant requests for surveillance, was intended to appease the public anger provoked by the outrageous abuses…