Wednesday, July 24, 2013

United States Congress Rejects Curbing Spy Programs

House rejects curbing US spying program

Wed Jul 24, 2013 11:9PM GMT
presstv.ir

U.S. House of Representatives votes that the National Security Agency can go on with its controversial spying program collecting millions of phone records of Americans.

A 217-205 Wednesday vote against Republican Rep. Justin Amash’s effort rejected to end administration’s authority to conduct surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans.

Rep. Amash said his effort was aimed to "defend the privacy of every American" and the U.S. Constitution.

The legislation introduced by Mr. Amash was supposed to cancel the statutory authority for the NSA mass surveillance program as part of a nearly 600 billion defense spending bill for the next year.

His move was faced with hard lobbing by the White House, national security experts in Congress and many Republicans.

The amendment would cut funding for NSA’s spying program on phone calls which is part of the classified $30 billion intelligence budget.

Tuesday, the White House also issued a statement criticizing the House’s effort “to hastily dismantle” the call tracking program, and calling on lawmakers to vote down the legislation.

In response, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, a critic of the government’s spying operations, blasted national security officials, saying they have “actively” misled the American public about domestic surveillance.

Years ago, Wyden had warned that the US government was secretly interpreting its powers under the Patriot Act in an alarming way. Wyden is now warning that the government’s theory of its power under the Patriot Act to collect records about people from third parties is “essentially limitless.”

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last month disclosed that the government has been snooping on phone calls and emails of American citizens and other nationals.

The 30-year-old whistleblower is wanted in the US on charges of espionage and theft of government property.

AN/DT

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