Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., was the fourth no vote opposing...

week (http://bit.ly/1eVx5Xg). The report disclosed votes and the amendment process in a much fuller detail than was previously known. The legislation, which privacy advocates criticize for preserving the government’s phone records bulk collection practices (CD Nov 4 p10), cleared the committee in an 11-4 vote, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., all announced their no votes then. Coburn’s office did not then respond to requests for comment, and the fourth vote of opposition was unknown until now. Feinstein expanded on her views at length in the report and said Senate Intelligence had considered whether telcos rather than the government should retain the phone data, but that idea “would not meet the Intelligence Community’s operational needs,” she said. She defended the bulk collection program’s legality. Several committee members previously touted amendments they had successfully integrated into the bill, but Feinstein’s report detailed certain amendments that failed to become part of the act. The committee voted 7-8 to reject an amendment from Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., that would have limited the retention of bulk metadata to three years. The current standard is five years, and the National Security Agency has said data should be retained for at least three years to ensure its usefulness. Feinstein, Wyden, Udall and Heinrich all backed Rockefeller’s failed amendment. Coburn had proposed his own amendment to kill any restrictions at all on the retention of bulk metadata, which failed in a 6-9 vote. The committee also voted 4-11 to reject an amendment by Wyden to hold more open hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the 2013 calendar year. Udall and Wyden previously described trying to end bulk collection of business records under Patriot Act Section 215, which Udall had introduced as an amendment rejected in a 3-12 vote, with only Wyden, Udall and Heinrich backing it. Another Wyden amendment requiring “the public disclosure of any decision of the FISC that concerns a violation of the Constitution” narrowly failed in a 7-8 vote, and he attempted and failed to replace the Feinstein bill text with his own Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act in a 3-12 vote. The committee also rejected a Heinrich amendment by a 7-8 vote to forbid cell site location information bulk collection. Wyden, Udall and Heinrich wrote the report’s minority views section. The act would “codify the government’s authority to collect the phone records of huge numbers of law-abiding Americans, and also to conduct warrantless searches for individual Americans’ phone calls and emails,” those three senators said. “We respectfully but firmly disagree with this approach.”