The White House on Tuesday voiced strong support for legislation that would significantly restrict the U.S. surveillance program that collects phone metadata from millions of Americans.
The Obama administration said it "strongly supports" the USA Freedom Act, which is up for vote in the House this week, and urged the Senate to support the House in passing the measure.
"The administration applauds and appreciates the strong bipartisan and bicameral effort that led to the formulation of this bill, which strikes an appropriate balance between significant reform and preservation of important national security tools," it said on Tuesday, reported The Hill.
"The USA Freedom Act's significant reforms would provide the public greater trust and confidence in our national security programs and the checks and balances that form an integral part of their operation," the White House added. "The administration supports swift House passage of the USA Freedom Act, and urges the Senate to follow suit."
The bill would extend three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act through 2019, including the provision that the NSA uses to justify its unwarranted mass surveillance program that collects millions of people's phone records - the same program that a federal appeals court last week said is illegal.
Rather than conducting mass sweeps for records, as is currently done, the bill would force intelligence agencies to search through private companies' databases using a "specific selection term."
The legislation is expected to easily make it through the House. It will then travel to the Senate, where it will meet Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, who has repeatedly expressed support for the NSA's current data-collection programs, saying just last week that the Freedom Act "will neither keep us safe nor protect our privacy."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., urged senators on Monday to pass the legislation, saying he hopes McConnell "will reassess his priorities and instead choose to protect Americans' civil liberties," according to The Hill.
"It must be extended and reformed," he said. "It would be irresponsible to merely reauthorize and not reform. How can you reauthorize something that's illegal? You can't. You shouldn't."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate group which had originally supported the Freedom Act, withdrew its support Monday, citing in an Ars Technica op-ed piece the the need for lawmakers to add more reform provisions to the bill in light of the court ruling declaring the program illegal. The group also said that the "specific selection term" lacks a rigorous definition.
"Pending those improvements, EFF is withdrawing our support of the bill," the group said in a blog post. "We're urging Congress to roll the draft back to the stronger and meaningful reforms included in the 2013 version of USA Freedom and affirmatively embrace the Second Circuit's opinion on the limits of Section 215."
The ACLU also pulled support for the Freedom Act, with the group's deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer saying that "Congress should let Section 215 sunset as it's scheduled to, and then it should turn to reforming the other surveillance authorities that have been used to justify bulk collection."
