Three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee slammed a Foreign Intelligence SurveillancernAct bill that recently cleared their committee. The FISA Improvements Act (S-1681), a product of Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., passed 11-4. It “would explicitly permit the government to engage inrndragnet collection as long as there were rules about when officials could look at these phone records,”rnwrote Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., in a joint New York Timesrnop-ed Tuesday (http:/yti.ms/1b2KEwt). “It would also give intelligence agencies wide latitude to conductrnwarrantless searches for Americans’ phone calls and emails.” They all voted against Feinstein’s proposalrnduring the Oct. 31 committee vote. Feinstein recently attached the FISA Improvements Act as anrnamendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (CD Nov 25 p10), and these senators also proposedrntheir own NDAA amendments on surveillance law. Wyden, Udall and Heinrich touted their IntelligencernOversight and Surveillance Reform Act, S-1551, which they say would end bulk collection of phone metadata,rncreate a constitutional advocate for the FISA court and amend FISA Section 702, among otherrnchanges. That bill now has 13 co-sponsors, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, DVt.,rnwho introduced a similar proposal called the USA Freedom Act a month after they did. Leahy’s billrn(S-1599) has 18 co-sponsors, including all three of these Senate Intelligence members. “We will push tornhold a comprehensive reform debate on the Senate floor,” the three said in the op-ed.
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