USA President Barack Obama has signed legislation reviving and reshaping surveillance laws that expired temporarily on Sunday night.
The White House says Obama signed the USA Freedom Act late on June 02,2015 Tuesday evening, hours after the Senate gave its final approval.
The law eliminates the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk phone-records collection program and replaces it with a more restrictive measure to keep the records in phone companies' hands.
Obama had blamed Congress for needless delays and an 'inexcusable lapse' in national security tools.
However, he also praised some senators and House members for working in bipartisan fashion to come up with a compromise
The bill was approved by the Senate 67-32 and is the first major overhaul of government surveillance laws in decades, shifting the bulk collection of phone data from the NSA to telecoms companies
It was a historic moment for civil liberty advocates as
much as it was for libertarians of the American right when the U.S.
Senate on Tuesday passed on a vote of 67-32, and President Barack Obama
signed into law, the first reform in a decade limiting the sweeping
powers of the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on
millions of citizens’ telephone conversations.
The
USA Freedom Act is now operational after the US Patriot Act, the
post-9/11 measure permitting mass global surveillance by the NSA on an
unprecedented scale, expired on Sunday at midnight after attempts to
extend it were blocked by Republican Senator Rand Paul.
The
USAFA represents the first major reform to the NSA’s mass surveillance
of global communications that has been effected since whistleblower and
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the full extent of the
spying programmes to the world in 2013, even though many called for
further reform pointing out that spying on foreigners was untouched by
this bill.
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