Published time: September 27, 2013 16:01
US Senate (Select) Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)(L) speaks with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (2nd L), National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole (R) before they testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington, September 26, 2013. (Reuters/Jason Reed)
A bipartisan group of US senators is trying to ban the NSA’s blanket surveillance program in a radical bill proposed to the Senate Intelligence Committee. But a milder bill from chairwoman Diane Feinstein would sanction more snooping on US citizens.
Thursday’s Committee hearing on reforming the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reviewed the two rival bills
in an effort to find a balance between security and privacy. The
Committee is expected to have further lively debate on the
proposed legislation next week, before the bill is sent for
consideration by the full Senate.
‘In the nation’s best interest’
Two members of the Intelligence Committee, Democrats Ron Wyden
(D-Ore) and Mark Udall (D-Colo), along with fellow senators
Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) and Rand Paul (R-Ky) tabled a bill
Wednesday that would drastically cut the NSA’s powers, in
particular banning the controversial mass call log collection
program, which allows the NSA to log and record all phone
conversations in the US.
At Thursday’s hearing, three generals representing the US
secret services had to face a barrage of awkward questions, but
refused to give up total surveillance, claiming it served
national interests and helped to prevent terrorist attacks.
Both Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and
National Security Agency director Keith Alexander testified
that US spying agencies were merely logging all phone calls and
e-mails inside the US, without actually reading the e-mails and
and listening to the calls without a court order. But the
critical senators seemed unconvinced.
“Is it the goal of the NSA to collect the phone records of
all Americans?” Senator Mark Udall asked at the
Committee hearing.
“Yes, I believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put
all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when
the nation needs to do it. Yes,” Alexander replied.
The milder bill was advocated
Thursday by a group of senators led by Committee chairwoman
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif).
She said the Senate would like to set new, tighter standards on
what data the NSA can record, collect and store, and also for how
long. NSA analysts should better have a “reasonable
articulable suspicion” of ongoing terrorist activities before
they put any phone number on record, Feinstein said.
As US security agencies face greater skepticism from the public
in the wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about
US spy agencies’ eavesdropping programs, the senators said some
concessions from US intelligence agencies were inevitable.
Clapper agreed that intercepted data should only be stored for a
legally limited period of time, and promised that he would
consider releasing information on how the sensitive data had been
used.
Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole, also attending
the Committee hearing, backed the idea to allow outside lawyers
into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, the
entity overseeing the eavesdropping programs, for the most
important cases.
In the hearing, Feinstein said the surveillance programs were
necessary because they protected Americans from terror attacks
akin to this week’s massacre in the shopping mall in Kenya’s
capital, Nairobi.
“The death and destruction we saw at the Westgate mall in
Nairobi could have been at a mall in the United States,”
Feinstein said.
Senate promotes surveillance on American soil
However, Feinstein’s bill would also seek to expand the US
government’s spying capabilities by authorizing the monitoring
of terror suspects the NSA is tracking overseas when they
arrive in the US.
Currently, when a suspected terrorist arrives in America, the
NSA has to halt its surveillance, creating a legal loophole.
“I call it the terrorist lottery loophole,” said
Republican Senator Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee. “If you can find your way from
a foreign country where we have reasonable suspicion that you
are … a terrorist … and get to the United States, under a
current rule, they need to turn it off and do a complicated
handoff to the FBI,” Rogers said.
The new bill would allow the NSA to legally continue
eavesdropping on a person for seven days after arriving to the
US without asking for authorization from a court.
Lawmakers would also like the US Senate to take an active part
in nominating the NSA director, who is currently recommended by
the defense secretary and nominated by the president.
When Wyden bluntly asked NSA
chief Keith Alexander whether the NSA had ever collected data
about the whereabouts of American citizens, or just planned to
pinpoint their locations using cellphone signals, the general
declined to answer, referring to the classified nature of such
information.
“I believe this is something the American people have a right
to know, whether the NSA has ever collected or made plans to
collect cell site information,” Wyden said, accusing the NSA
of “repeatedly deceiving the American people.”
Democratic Senator Wyden, who has been for years working with
classified data as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
also derided the NSA’s complaints about the damage to US national
security caused by the recent leaks.
“You talk about the damage that has been done by disclosures,
but any government official who thought this would never be
disclosed was ignoring history. The truth always manages to come
out,” he said.
Copyright: RT