WASHINGTON — The House has passed a bill to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of American phone records, responding to the outrage that followed former NSA analyst Edward Snowden’s revelations of the practice last year.
The Senate is expected to take up the bill. But civil liberties activists and technology companies say it does not go nearly far enough.
The USA Freedom Act tracks a proposal made in January by President Barack Obama, who said he wanted to end the NSA’s practice of collecting the “to and from” records of nearly every American landline telephone call.
The bill requires the phone companies to keep the records for 18 months — something they already were doing— and allows the NSA to search for connections to terrorist plots abroad in response to a court order.
KEN DILANIAN, AP Intelligence Writer