Saxby Chambliss thinks America’s surveillance laws are sound and the agencies are following them well.
But Georgia’s senior senator will move a bill this week to beef up privacy and reporting standards in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
You can thank Edward Snowden.
The infamous leaker of how the National Security Agency has gathered American phone and email data in its relentless pursuit of worldwide terror has provoked outrage in the public and forced Congress to react, while he himself is on the lam in Russia and branded a traitor by many.
The Senate’s civil libertarians, led by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., are trying to build support for a large-scale overhaul of FISA.
Meanwhile, Chambliss and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will put forth some tweaks, acknowledging the public’s desire to act but not poking holes in the intelligence apparatus they see as successful.
It likely will be a breeze in committee, though on the floor it will become a test of how much Snowden’s revelations have changed the Senate’s opinion on surveillance. The baseline is a December extension of FISA amendments that provoked a similar debate.
The Chambliss/Feinstein bill, as described by Feinstein in a rare public hearing of the Intelligence Committee last week, would limit who has access to Americans’ phone “metadata” – the record of incoming and outgoing calls.
It also would require analysts to have “reasonable articulable suspicion” that a number is connected to terrorism before accessing the metadata database, and the bill would expressly prohibit listening to the calls without a warrant.
The Wyden bill, meanwhile, would prohibit any warrantless bulk collection of Americans' phone and email records. The government still could seek records for terror suspects, but would not have access to all that metadata.
It would also add an adversarial element to the secretive FISA courts, a “constitutional advocate” to spar with a government attorney before judges who critics claim are too quick to rubber stamp requests.
The Chambliss/Feinstein bill requires the administration to report all phone numbers it searches to the court. Also, statistics on the process would be made public: the number of searches, and the number of leads and warrants that result.
Thursday’s public hearing offered a chance for Chambliss and Feinstein to defend intelligence gatherers. The officials testifying – Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole – claimed the media have misled the public about their programs and said the Snowden revelations had been damaging to national security.
“I think the American people need to hear more about the damage these leaks, including the inaccurate stories, have caused not only our intelligence collection and ability to identify terrorists before they strike, but as well as vital foreign policy partnerships,” Chambliss said.
Chambliss asked Alexander to explain how phone metadata could have led authorities to one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.
“In my opinion, if we had that prior to 9/11 we would have known about the plot,” Alexander replied.
Wyden sharply questioned Alexander about whether the NSA has ever collected or planned to collect cell tower data to track Americans’ location. Alexander said NSA is not currently collecting that through its metadata program, but the full answer is classified.
That half-acknowledgement of an answer is another example of Snowden fallout, as secrets are more tenuous. In March, Wyden asked Clapper at an open hearing if the government was collecting any type of data at all on millions of Americans, knowing full well through his own classified briefings what the answer was.
Clapper replied: “No sir. Not wittingly.”
Snowden revealed the lie.
“For some, this has led to a lowering of trust in the intelligence community,” Clapper said Thursday. “And we do understand the concerns of the public.”
