Feinstein has backup plan for NSA reform

If the Senate stalls on a surveillance reform bill next week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she has a backup plan.

Feinstein — the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — said Thursday that she expects the Senate to eventually take up legislation to reform the National Security Agency (NSA), which sailed through the House on Wednesday, despite the objections of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

{mosads}”My sense is that the House bill… will be voted on,” she told The Hill.

“I voted for it before; I’ll vote for it again,” she added, referring to similar legislation last year that came two votes shy of overcoming a filibuster.

“If it doesn’t have 60 votes, it’ll be my intention to introduce a measure that would require the holding of the data by the telecoms.”

The plan is sure to meet opposition from privacy advocates, who say that any requirement that phone companies to hold onto customers’ data for longer than they currently do is unnecessary to protect the country and could infringe upon people’s privacy. During negotiations on last year’s NSA reform bill, Feinstein was said to be eyeing a similar provision, though she did not end up attaching it to the legislation.

Still, her plan could be one path forward if the Senate hits a wall when it turns to surveillance reform next week. 

Critics of the USA Freedom Act, which would end the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records and was approved by the House 338-88 on Wednesday, say that taking the records out of the NSA’s hands would make it harder for the agency to connect the dots between possible terrorists.

“It would have untrained — untrained — corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols do the collecting,” McConnell said on the floor last week. “So it switches this responsibility from the NSA, with total oversight, to corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols.”

McConnell has opposed taking the USA Freedom Act up in the Senate, but he may have to concede on the issue if he wants to renew portions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the month.

The majority leader is expected to bring up his own “clean” reauthorization of the expiring provisions that leaves them unchanged, but that appears unlikely to pass, given the staunch opposition from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

If the USA Freedom Act also receives a floor vote, McConnell could rally Republicans to vote against it. That might set the stage for Feinstein to use her provision to bridge a divide between the two sides.