Members of Congress are suddenly finding themselves more informed than ever about a scandalous NSA surveillance program in the wake of an intelligence leak that has embarrassed the United States government.
Lawmakers in Washington, DC were briefed on the program late
Tuesday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and legal and
intelligence officials, according to the Associated Press, in
what marked the first time that Congress came face-to-face with
the players closest to the National Security Administration
scandal since The Guardian began publishing leaked NSA documents
last Thursday.
“People aren’t satisfied,” Rep. Tim Murphy
(R-Pennsylvania) told the AP after Tuesday night’s briefing
“More detail needs to come out.”
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), a defender of the
surveillance program, even told AP that Congress should take the
time to reassess the NSA’s policies.
“Congress needs to debate this issue and determine what tools
we give to our intelligence community to protect us from a
terrorist attack,” he said. “Really it’s a debate between
public safety, how far we go with public safety and protecting us
from terrorist attacks versus how far we go on the other
side.”
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander will answer questions from the
Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on Wednesday
afternoon, and the Senate and House intelligence committees will
be briefed on the programs again Thursday. So far, though,
shot-callers in Washington seem largely split on perhaps the
first example to surface so far of the Obama administration’s
attempt to weigh security with privacy in its war against terror.
“As you heard the president say on Friday, he believes that we
must strike a balance between our security interests and our
desire for privacy,” White House press secretary Jay Carney
said earlier this week when defending the program. “He made
clear that you cannot have 100 percent security and 100 percent
privacy, and thus we need to find that balance.”
The leaked documents, released by the Guardian last week and
attributed to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, showed that
the NSA has requested the phone records for the millions of
Verizon customers in the US regularly and also taps into the
servers of nine major Internet entities in order to intercept
communications when investigating alleged terrorism. The American
Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Obama
administration on Tuesday over the mass call tracking program,
labeling the “unprecedented mass surveillance” of phone
calls as a violation of “Americans’ constitutional rights of
free speech, association and privacy.”
The ACLU is asking the government to cease the mass call tracking
program and purge its records immediately. Meanwhile, though,
members of Congress like Murphy and Ruppersberger are simply
asking for answers.
But other lawmakers have attempted to discuss the topic before,
which in it of itself is becoming a whole other issue erupting on
the Hill. On March 12, Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper testified during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing
that the NSA does not gather “any type of data at all on
millions of Americans.” That was question posed by Sen. Ron
Wyden (D-Oregon), at least, who in response was told by Clapper,
“No, sir.”
“Not wittingly,” Clapper continued. “There are cases
where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not
wittingly.”
Following leaked evidence showing otherwise, Sen. Wyden issued a
statement explaining his line of questioning:
“So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question
to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing
was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his
answer,” Wyden wrote. “Now public hearings are needed to
address the recent disclosures and the American people have the
right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership
to the questions asked by their representatives.”
Sen. Wyden has long been critical of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, or FISA, a law that allows the government to
collect data on the communications of Americans if they are
reasonably thought to be communication with persons located
outside of the US.
“When the public finds out that these secret interpretations
are so dramatically different than what the public law says, I
think there’s going to be extraordinary anger in the
country,” Wyden told HuffPost Live earlier this year.
“Because it’s one thing to have debates about laws… but we
assume that the law itself is public.”
On Sunday, Clapper told NBC News that he responded to Wyden’s
question while on the stand with “what I thought was the most
truthful, or least untruthful, manner.” There have since been
calls for Clapper’s resignation or termination from the role of
DNI.
This article originally appeared on: RT