The U.S. Senate advanced legislation on Sunday reforming a controversial program that collects Americans’ telephone call records, but final passage appeared doubtful before the surveillance system expires at midnight.
A bill that would end U.S. spy agencies’ bulk collection of the telephone data and replace it with a more targeted system cleared a crucial procedural hurdle, ending an impasse over whether to move ahead with the legislation.
Under the law, the eavesdropping National Security Agency collects and searches U.S. telephone records – but not the content of the calls themselves – in a program first made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The Freedom Act, which ends the spy agencies’ bulk collection of domestic telephone “metadata” and replaces it with a more targeted system, has already passed the House by an overwhelming margin and has Obama’s strong support.
Under the Freedom Act, the telephone records would be held by telecommunications companies, not the government, and the NSA would have to get court approval to gain access to specific data.
