NSA to test legal limits on surveillance if USA Freedom Act becomes law

[Commentary] In a secured room beneath the US Capitol, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama Administration and the intelligence services.

The NSA, its credibility hurt by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures, is trying to reassure its overseers that it will abide by new congressional action, even as its advocates labor to shape the bill to its liking. But the agency's post-9/11 history has left the architects and advocates of the bill concerned about the ways in which it might once again reinterpret a law intended to restrain it into one allowing it more surveillance leeway than congressional architects intend.

Recent meetings between Hill aides and administration and intelligence lawyers yielded a sense of the legal reasoning likely to result if the USA Freedom Act becomes law. The NSA thinks it has not earned the public’s suspicion and has sought to assuage it since the Snowden disclosures. Its battalions of lawyers are preoccupied with restraining surveillance, veterans say, far more than they are with expanding the frontiers of the law. Still, congressional testimony has suggested that the agency will be reluctant to let legislation aimed at restricting surveillance have the final word.