US Senate votes against bill to reform NSA

The US Senate has not passed a bill to curb the large-scale collection of telecom metadata by the NSA. The bill received broad support, including from tech companies and the NSA chairman himself, but narrowly did not make it.

It is true that 58 Senate members voted for and 42 against, but the USA Freedom Act needed 60 votes to be passed, Ars Technica writes. Of the 42 votes against, 41 came from Republicans. New initiatives to curb the NSA’s working methods are unlikely to make it in the coming years either: after January 1, Republicans will have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The USA Freedom Act was supposed to end the dragnet method of collecting telephony metadata. In addition, the law proposed installing a special privacy attorney at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which hears requests from the FBI and NSA to gather intelligence.

The USA Freedom Act had strong support from tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple, who on Tuesday called for the bill to be passed. The president of the NSA himself had also expressed his support. However, there were also opponents among civil rights movements and other privacy advocates, who felt that, for example, the definition of data that the government should be allowed to collect had been stretched too far.