US senator seeks strong curbs on NSA metadata collection
A new Senate proposal to curb the government's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records and increase transparency about the program has White House backing, and may get more traction with critics who have dismissed other bills as too weak.
Democrat senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the legislation in the United States upper house yesterday.
Because it does more to clamp down on the data collection exposed last year by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, Leahy's bill was expected to be more attractive to privacy advocates than a bill passed by the US House of Representatives in May. Leahy's bill was welcomed by the Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) lobby group, which said it addresses many of the issues identified in the previous version of the proposed USA Freedom Act that was introduced in Congress.
