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Obama promised to act after revelations by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that
the NSA had been collecting and storing the data, including
numbers called and the time and length of calls but not their
content.
The administration has said it no longer wants agencies such as
the NSA to hold the data and last year quietly abandoned one
alternative to have such data held by a non-governmental third
party.
The remaining option is for telecommunications companies to
gather and store the data themselves.
But according to two U.S. officials, the companies have
privately told Congress they will not do so unless they are
ordered to by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which
needs new powers from Congress to issue such orders.
Last year, Congress failed to pass a bill to create such powers,
and a Congressional aide said that no such legislation was now
pending. The aide and an executive branch official said that
prospects for passing such legislation before a June deadline
were uncertain.
Robert Litt, legal adviser to the Director of National
Intelligence, confirmed that the government's current legal
authority to handle telephone metadata expires on June 1.
"I'm hoping we will be able to get legislation passed. Everybody
recognizes that there is utility to this," he said in a
conference call with reporters on Tuesday.
Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, however, said he saw
"no administration plan for going ahead" with telephone metadata
collection.
Asked what spy agencies would do if no new law was passed to
authorize collection of the metadata, Litt said: "I don't think
we're making those kinds of contingency plans at this point."
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by David Storey and Ken
Wills)
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