{"id":21310,"date":"2013-07-26T10:19:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T15:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21310"},"modified":"2013-07-26T10:19:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-26T15:19:57","slug":"justin-amash-and-the-attempt-to-rein-in-the-nsa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/07\/26\/justin-amash-and-the-attempt-to-rein-in-the-nsa\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Amash and the attempt to rein-in the NSA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Weigel<\/a> looks at the unexpectedly close vote in congress that would have forced the NSA to “walk back” some of its current domestic surveilance operations:<\/p>\n

For a few minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Justin Amash thought he might have killed the National Security Agency\u2019s metadata collection program. He\u2019d optimistically expected maybe 90 Republicans to back his amendment to the Department of Defense budget. Ninety-four of them did. But he ran out of votes eventually \u2014 the Democrats didn\u2019t come through \u2014 and by a 217\u2013205 margin, the House killed his amendment.<\/p>\n

Amash loaded the confetti cannon anyway. \u201cMy friends and colleagues stuck with me on my NSA amendment and changed the dynamic of the debate with tonight’s close vote,\u201d the Republican congressman tweeted. \u201cWhat an amazing staff I have. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Defenders of the NSA program are furious that Amash even got that far, and are working to undermine him. According to Politico<\/em>\u2019s Jake Sherman, Amash started this process with an \u201cunworkable amendment\u201d that would have failed easily, until staffers \u201cheld his hand\u201d to fix it. That\u2019s their story, but it doesn\u2019t reflect what led up to the amendment. In the wake of Edward Snowden\u2019s disclosures, every member of Congress who\u2019d been sitting on some security state reform picked it back up and reintroduced it. In the Senate, Utah\u2019s Mike Lee (a Republican) and Oregon\u2019s Jeff Merkley (a Democrat) brought back the Ending Secret Law Act that they couldn\u2019t pass when FISA was reauthorized. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, both Democrats, introduced legislation to restrict NSA data collection unless the material contained a \u201cdemonstrated link to terrorism or espionage.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, the lack of quick action on those bills suggested that the Snowden story had been a blip. Privacy advocates in Congress now refer to those bills as the first wave, part of a strategy of attrition that will make the current policy politically untenable.<\/p>\n

Amash proved the NSA will have to concede some ground when his amendment moved quickly from obscurity to reality to being under attack from the administration. On Monday night, before the Rules Committee voted on which amendments to bring up, Amash was told to meet with Speaker of the House John Boehner on the floor. He returned from that meeting convinced (and surprised) that he\u2019d get a vote after all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Weigel looks at the unexpectedly close vote in congress that would have forced the NSA to “walk back” some of its current domestic surveilance operations: For a few minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Justin Amash thought he might have killed the National Security Agency\u2019s metadata collection program. He\u2019d optimistically expected maybe 90 Republicans to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,53,13],"tags":[698,768,913,517,911],"class_list":["post-21310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-politics","category-usa","tag-congress","tag-democrat","tag-nsa","tag-republican","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5xI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21311,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21310\/revisions\/21311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}