Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced his opposition to a bill aimed at curbing government data collection, citing the recent beheading of American Peter Kassig by Islamic terrorists and the ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Yet, that is what this bill would do.”
The legislation, authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Va., and scheduled for a vote Tuesday, aims to end the broad collection of public electronic communication conducted by the National Security Administration, which had been scanning the data in an effort to prevent domestic terrorist attacks.
Leahy’s bill would transform the program into a more targeted collection of information and would include more safeguards to prevent unwarranted snooping by the federal government.
Critics of the bill believe it could hamper the NSA’s anti-terrorism surveillance.
Leahy’s bill responds to growing public criticism over the program by privacy groups and the public who believe the government is overstepping its snooping authority, which was first granted in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
McConnell defended the current program, saying the NSA collects merely the data about the call, and not its content.
McConnell wants the NSA debate to be postponed until the new year. That’s when Republicans will take over the Senate, and he will become majority leader.
The current authorization for the NSA’s activities does not expire until June.
“The authorities we enacted after Sept. 11, 2001, which were crafted to ensure that we integrated intelligence gathered overseas and here in the United States, are acutely relevant now,” McConnell said. “We live in a dangerous world. Threats like [the Islamic State] only make it more so.”
