• Listen to this segment with Shahid Buttar

• Listen to the entire program with Host Sonali Kolhatkar

President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee this week unveiled competing reforms to the NSA’s bulk data collection program.

The President has proposed ending the program altogether, and requiring the intelligence agency to obtain a judge’s permission to retrieve a suspect’s records from the telephone companies. Phone companies would not be required to keep data any longer than they already do, and a records will only be accessible for no more than 2 hops from a suspect’s phone contacts, instead of the current 3.

The House Intelligence Committee, headed by Republican Mike Rogers, offers a proposal that has come under fire from civil libertarians for actually expanding the NSA’s surveillance program, even though it is titled The End Bulk Collection Act. Rogers has long been a proponent of mass surveillance despite the fact that authorities have not been able to cite a single attack thwarted because of the vast data collection program.

GUEST: Shahid Buttar, Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Visit www.bordc.org for more information.