The latest botched effort at salvaging a controversial US surveillance program collapsed this week thanks to a sabotage campaign by the United States House Intelligence Committee, crushing any hope of unraveling the program's fate before Congress pivots to prevent a government shutdown in March.
A civil war between the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees has crippled months of efforts to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unpopular but crucial spy power, stunning the intelligence system and forcing security hawks to publicly argue in favor of surveillance tactics that even top spies acknowledge has been prone to abuse.
Witnesses to the events this week that forced House speaker Mike Johnson to shelve the latest Section 702 bill-the third of its kind to fail in as many months-say the leaders of HPSCI abandoned a deal that had been agreed to in private after weeks of negotiation.
Sources familiar with the negotiations asked not to be identified, as none of them are authorized to speak publicly.
The impetus for killing the deal, WIRED has learned, was an amendment that would end the government's ability to pay US companies for information rather than serving them with a warrant.
This includes location data collected from cell phones that are capable in many cases of tracking people's physical whereabouts almost constantly.
The data is purportedly gathered for advertising purposes but is collected by data brokers and frequently sold to US spies and police agencies instead. Senior aides say the HPSCI chair, Mike Turner, personally exploded the deal while refusing to appear for a hearing on Wednesday in which lawmakers were meant to decide the rules surrounding the vote.
A congressional website shows that HPSCI staff had not filed one of the amendments meant to be discussed before the Rules Committee, suggesting that at no point in the day did Turner plan to attend.
Two senior sources on the Hill who are working for members with direct knowledge of the events but are not affiliated with either of the relevant committees say that while lawmakers waited on Turner to appear, he was meeting privately with Johnson and threatening to kill the bill he'd already signed off on.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Fri, 16 Feb 2024 20:43:03 +0000