WASHINGTON — United States lawmakers angry about domestic telephone record-collection have lost a battle to curtail funding for the intelligence-gathering tools revealed by fugitive US security contractor Edward Snowden.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly approved continuing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records after a fierce debate pitting privacy rights against the government’s efforts to thwart terrorism.

The 217-205 vote rejected an amendment that would have limited the NSA’s ability to collect phone records unless it identified an individual under investigation, but also created a new burden on telephone companies to retain bulk data.

Those possibilities led the White House, Republican leaders and many congressional Democrats to oppose the proposal, pitting them against lawmakers from both parties who champion civil liberties and privacy.

The NSA has said that while it gathers information on all US phone calls to have it at hand, agency officials access the data only when needed for terrorism investigations.

Since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, Congress has authorised — and Republican and Democratic Presidents have signed — an extension of the powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists.

But following the disclosures this year, lawmakers have said they were shocked by the scope of the two programmes — one to collect records of hundreds of millions of calls, and the other allowing the NSA to sweep up Internet usage data from around the world that goes through nine major US-based providers.

Proponents of the NSA programmes argue that the surveillance operations have been successful in thwarting at least 50 terror plots across 20 countries, including 10 to 12 directed at the US. Among them was a 2009 plot to strike at the New York Stock Exchange. Agencies