Angry lawmakers warn NSA to curb surveillance operations
bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security.”
Representative Spencer Bachus (R-Alabama) said he “was not aware at all” of the extent of the surveillance, since the NSA programs were primarily briefed to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) revealed that an annual report provided to Congress by the government about the phone-records collection, something cited by intelligence officials as an example of their disclosures to Congress, is “less than a single page and not more than eight sentences.”
Representative Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) challenged the intelligence officials’ contention that the FISA court was “not a rubber stamp” by way of a baseball analogy. Jeffries noted that some of the greatest hitters in baseball history — the Cardinals’ Stan Musial, the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, the Tigers’ Ty Cobb, and the Yankees’ Babe Ruth — did not hit more than four balls safely per ten times at bat, for career batting averages ranging from Musial’s .331 to Cobb’s .366.
He then noted that the FISA court approves more than 99 percent of government requests for surveillance — which would give the government a lifetime batting average of .999 — saying: “But you’ve taken the position that the FISA court is an independent check.”
Robert Litt, the senior legal counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, stayed with Jeffries’s analogy, saying that when the government submits a surveillance request or “throws a pitch,” the FISA court “says ‘throw a little bit higher, a little more inside’” rather than ruling it out of the strike zone.
The New York Times reports that a coalition of Silicon Valley companies and civil liberties groups — including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union — will today (Thursday) urge President Obama to disclose more information about the NSA’s surveillance operations in order to have a more informed public debate on the issue.
In a letter to top administration officials, the coalition will ask that the government start opening up the surveillance process by allowing companies publicly disclose the number of secret requests for data they receive from the NSA, the number of individuals the requests cover, and whether the requests involve the content of communications or other data.
The Times notes that the letter does not demand an end to the domestic surveillance.
Microsoft sent a similar letter on its own to Attorney General Eric Holder.
Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Times that he planned to introduce legislation mandating public disclosure along the same lines as the recommendations in the coalition’s letter, while Representative Rick Larsen (D-Washington) said he was planning to introduce similar legislation in the House on Thursday.
