Also: NSA not as powereful as imagined ...
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Federal Power to Intercept Messages Is Extended By ROBERT PEAR Published: December 28, 2012
WASHINGTON - Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government's power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.
The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 73 to 23, clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority. Critics of the bill, including Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican, expressed concern that electronic surveillance, though directed at noncitizens, inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.
"The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless," Mr. Paul said, referring to the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. "Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance. Digital records seem to get less protection than paper records."
The bill, which extends the government's surveillance authority for five years, was approved in the House by a vote of 301 to 118 in September. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill in the next few days.
Congressional critics of the bill said that they suspected that intelligence agencies were picking up the communications of many Americans, but that they could not be sure because the agencies would not provide even rough estimates of how many people inside the United States had had communications collected under authority of the surveillance law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The inspector general of the National Security Agency told Congress that preparing such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office.
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