The US House of Representatives has passed landmark reforms curbing bulk collection of Americans' telephone records, the first step toward restricting NSA intelligence-gathering since Edward Snowden divulged the secret program last year.
But the reforms, backed by the White House, lost the support of civil liberties groups and tech companies like Google and Microsoft, after the Obama administration demanded changes to the bill that critics say watered down strict limits on collection of phone records and other personal data.
Despite an eruption of controversy in the run-up to the vote, Republicans and Democrats largely got behind the potentially historic reforms, approving the legislation 303-121 on Thursday.
Lawmakers were furious that the White House demanded changes to the bill to allow for broader interpretation of which information could be collected, and from whom.
Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican author of the original Patriot Act that gave intelligence agencies broad powers after the September 11 2001 attacks, but who later became a critic of espionage overreach, said the bill marked a viable compromise that retained the government's ability to protect Americans' security as well as civil liberties.
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"The days of the NSA indiscriminately vacuuming up more data than it can store will end with the USA Freedom Act," Sensenbrenner said.
"This is the end of secret laws," he said, noting that companies storing the data are given broader discretion to disclose their cooperation with the government.
"If the administration abuses the intent of the bill, everyone will know."
But congressman Mike Honda blasted the administration for "drastically" weakening the bill, saying it now "leaves open the possibility the bulk surveillance could still continue".
In the original bill, the National Security Agency no longer would have been allowed to use secret court orders to gather telephone data on unlimited millions of Americans.
Collected data, meanwhile, would have been stored with telecom companies, not government groups like the NSA.
The amended language has "moved in the wrong direction," said the Reform Government Surveillance coalition, which includes Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.
The bill now awaits action by the Senate which is expected to consider it next month.
