House of Representatives and NSA

Apparently, American lawmakers aren’t interested in curbing the PRISM spy program. Press reports revealed that the House of Representatives voted 217-205 to defeat an amendment to the defense appropriations bill. The latter was supposed to limit the NSA’s ability to harvest electronic data, including telephone call records.

Fighting the legislation was an unlikely alliance of libertarian Republicans and some Democrats in Congress. In result, 94 Republicans favored the amendment and 134 didn’t, while 111 Democrats supported it and 83 opposed. However, the White House and senior intelligence officials were against the amendment by Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, prompted by Snowden’s leak.

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The lawmakers approved $600 billion in Pentagon spending for the next year – this figure also includes the costs of the Afghanistan war. Meanwhile, Republican representative Tom Cotton explained that there was nothing to worry about because the “metadata” was being harvested as a five-column spreadsheet with the numbers communicating, date, time and duration of call.

Cotton assured that the program has prevented dozens of terrorist attacks and saved unspecified number of American lives. He didn’t say when these events happened, which is quite weird, because so far no one has actually ever cited any case with terrorists being pre-empted by PRISM. In addition, Cotton is a former Army captain known to have been served in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means that he won’t support anything that limits defense spending.

Justin Amash of Michigan, a conservative Republican, along with other supporters of the amendment, explained that the question was whether the American government had the right to gather and retain the personal communications information of US citizens. According to Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, the authorities have gone too far in the name of security. Poe was calling for a number of things, including a reining in of government invasion, the ending of dragnet operations, and the need to get a special warrant based on probable cause or nothing at all. Hopefully, Edward Snowden’s revelations and current troubles won’t be for nothing.