GOP reportedly trying to move solo bill on U.S.-soil spy program
WASHINGTON — The House will try to reauthorize and limit a surveillance program that lets the government collect foreign intelligence on U.S. soil, without relying on the budget or other must-pass legislation to get it through Congress, according to Republicans apprised of the plan.
House leaders intend to release one reauthorization proposal that combines bills endorsed by the House Intelligence, House Judiciary and Senate Intelligence committees, senior GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday.
Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told House Republicans at a conference Tuesday morning that the combination measure would not be attached to the continuing resolution being debated this week, said Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas.
“We’ve got to get it done before we leave this week,” Conaway added.
But it is not yet clear how the new bill will combine existing proposals, or that the Senate is on board with the House’s plan to advance the bill through Congress on its own.
Absent congressional action, the National Security Agency’s authority to collect emails and other communications of overseas foreign targets from U.S. companies — an authority known as Section 702 — will expire at the end of the year.
The intelligence community ranks a reauthorization of this surveillance power as its top legislative priority for 2017.
Lawmakers have resisted the intelligence community’s calls to renew the surveillance authority without imposing certain restrictions on it first, based on concerns that the program has few safeguards to protect the privacy of Americans who may have been in touch with foreign targets.
The FBI currently can search the database of surveillance records collected under Section 702 for information about Americans without first obtaining a warrant.
The House Judiciary Committee’s proposal is the most restrictive of the three proposals being incorporated into the forthcoming, stand-alone Section 702 bill. It requires the FBI, in criminal cases, to obtain a warrant before being able to view anything resulting from a query for information about Americans in the database. That requirement would not apply to counterterrorism or counterintelligence cases.
The House Intelligence Committee would require a court order to view the substance of similar queries, while the Senate Intelligence Committee’s proposal creates a procedural hurdle for the FBI, requiring it to submit a formal request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rule on the legality of any queries that turn up information about “a known United States person.” The secret court considers any request for foreign intelligence or law enforcement purposes to be legal.
It was not immediately clear how Republican leaders planned to resolve those competing proposals.
“I don’t know what it’s going to look like,” Rep. Thomas Rooney, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence panel’s subcommittee on the NSA and cybersecurity, said Tuesday afternoon. He also suggested that separating out Section 702 legislation was politically necessary to preserve a coalition around the continuing resolution.
Noting that “members of the Freedom Caucus and other libertarian types … have a problem with 702,” Rooney said he was glad that the bill reauthorizing it is being separated from must-pass legislation.
“They really shouldn’t be included with each other,” he said. “This needs to be debated by itself.”