Senate stalls on NSA renewal

Phone surveillance program to be halted until reauthorization

WASHINGTON — After 14 years and hundreds of millions of records of telephone calls, the National Security Agency stopped bulk collection of Americans’ phone data Sunday, officials said, as legal authority for the once-secret program expired.

The move came as the Senate stalled on efforts to reform the agency’s authority. The portion of the 2006 Patriot Act amendments that the NSA has argued allows collection of telephone calling data and other records expired at midnight EDT.

Late Sunday afternoon, intelligence officials said they had started shutting down the system for scooping up and recording phone call data, which was put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The NSA collects what it calls metadata — records that include the numbers called from a phone and the length of calls, but not the content of the conversations.

Officials said they planned to shut down the program entirely at midnight, although their actions, which are classified, can’t readily be verified.

Sunday evening, the Senate voted 77 to 17 to limit debate on a House-passed bill that would reform NSA surveillance. That bill would end the bulk collection of telephone data. Under it, phone companies, not the government, would hold the call data, and

intelligence agencies would be required to have a warrant to search it.

Under Senate rules, no final vote on that measure can take place until later this week unless all senators agree, which Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., refused to do, arguing that the House bill does not go far enough to rein in the intelligence agencies. His move guaranteed that the NSA’s legal authority would end, at least for now. The Senate appears likely to pass the House bill as early as Tuesday.

The lapse in the NSA’s power marks an important moment in the evolving U.S. response to the threat of terrorism. It is the first major legislative rebuff of domestic surveillance operations in the post-9/11 era and the most direct impact to date of the disclosures made by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who revealed the existence of the data collection program two years ago.

Debate over the program has sharply divided the parties, most vividly the Republicans.

The division has become a major element in the party’s presidential campaign and a key factor stalling Senate action.

As the process of shutting down the surveillance apparatus started, senators returned to the Capitol for a rare Sunday session facing a deadline, but with no clear plan for meeting it.

Tensions spilled over quickly after the debate began as Arizona Sen. John McCain, a strong supporter of the NSA’s surveillance efforts, tried to prevent Paul, his fellow Republican, from speaking.

“This is what we fought the Revolution over,” Paul thundered once he was allowed to speak. “This is a debate over your right to be left alone.” The Senate visitor’s gallery was packed with Paul supporters wearing red T-shirts.

“People say, ‘How will we protect ourselves?’” without surveillance, he said, responding, “Use the Constitution. Get a warrant.”

Paul sought to pin the program on the current administration, saying, “President Obama set this program up.”

The program was established by the George W. Bush administration without congressional authorization late in 2001. In 2006, after passage of the Patriot Act amendments, the Bush administration won approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, to continue the program under the Patriot Act’s Section 215.

Over the last two years, however, the Patriot Act has come under increasing criticism from a coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans. The Obama administration last year proposed ending the government’s collection of telephone data and instead having telephone companies hold the information. President Barack Obama said, however, that he would keep the program intact until Congress acted on an alternative.

A federal appeals court this spring ruled that the Patriot Act did not provide legal authority for the collection of millions of telephone records. But noting that the law was about to expire, the judges said they would put their ruling on hold for a few weeks while Congress debated whether to renew it.

The House just over a week ago passed its bill to limit the NSA’s powers.

That bill has support from the administration and a broad bipartisan swath of senators, but had been blocked in the Senate by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He and other defense hawks in the GOP wanted to keep the program running as is, without reforms.

On the other side, a group of senators led by Paul and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have pushed to rein in the NSA.

Although McConnell backs the presidential bid of Paul, his fellow Kentucky senator, the two are at odds on the surveillance issue.

Speaking Sunday, McConnell referred bitterly to “demagoguery” and a “campaign of misinformation” regarding the program, although he did not name anyone as responsible.

Obama has warned against taking away what his national security team contends is a vital tool needed to root out terrorist threats at home and abroad.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, CIA Director John Brennan decried “political grandstanding” and said Congress should extend the program. “These tools are important to American lives,” Brennan said.

Paul and other opponents of the NSA argue the collection of telephone data is not worth the infringement on civil liberties and believe the nation can be better protected if the program is scrapped and redone.

That stance has drawn sharp rebuke from several rivals for the Republican nomination.

On Sunday, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, said that the nation’s security would be at risk if the Senate failed to reauthorize the law, which his brother enacted as president.

“There’s no evidence, not a shred of evidence, that the metadata program has violated anybody’s civil liberties,” Bush said, also speaking on “Face the Nation.”

Two other parts of the Patriot Act that are set to expire would limit other aspects of the NSA’s surveillance operations that have been less contested.

Those include the “lone wolf” provision, which allows the government to apply for court permission to wiretap an individual suspected of terror activities who is not part of a larger group, and another that allows the government to conduct “roving wiretaps” as suspects switch phones.