Struggling to salvage a massive surveillance program, President Barack Obama was confronted by congressional critics of the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ telephone records Thursday as rising concerns made new limits on the intelligence effort appear increasingly likely.
Obama invited lawmakers on both sides of the issue to an Oval Office meeting designed to stem the bleeding of public support.
Among the participants were the NSA’s most vigorous congressional supporters — the top Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate intelligence panels — alongside its harshest critics, including Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado.
The lawmakers said there was a consensus that the surveillance efforts are suffering from perception problems that have undercut trust among the American people.
“There is openness to making changes,” said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence panel and a strong NSA defender, said Obama and the lawmakers didn’t agree to take specific steps, but brought up a number of proposals that will be fleshed out over the August congressional recess.
“A lot of ideas were thrown out,” Chambliss said. “Nothing was concluded.”
Wyden said he and Udall had sought to convince Obama of the urgency of addressing rising concerns. He said he proposed strengthening the government’s ability to get emergency authorization to collect an individual’s phone records, so that pre-emptive collection of everyone’s records would no longer be necessary.
“I felt that the president was open to ideas — and we’re going to make sure he has some,” Wyden said after returning to Capitol Hill.
Wyden and two Senate colleagues also unveiled legislation Thursday to overhaul the secret federal court that oversees the programs, which critics decry as largely a rubber stamp. The senators aim to make the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court more adversarial by creating a special advocate who could argue for privacy during closed-door proceedings and appeal decisions. A companion bill would diversify the court’s bench by ending the chief justice’s sole authority to pick its judges.
“These bills do not compromise national security, but they put a necessary opposing view in the FISA court and assure ideological diversity of judges,” said Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.
Debate over the line between counterterrorism and invasion of privacy has been heating up since former government contract systems analyst Edward Snowden leaked classified documents exposing the NSA’s monumental capability to sweep up data about phone and Internet use, including programs that store years of phone records on virtually every American. Snowden’s revelations have prompted a national rethinking over government surveillance powers that have grown since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The White House pledged to help Americans understand how the programs work, even as it staunchly defended their role in keeping a post-9/11 America safe.
“That process will continue,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “But I don’t think that we can sensibly say that programs designed to protect us from terrorist attack are not necessary in this day and age.”
The more information about the programs the government has released, the more it has fed even greater concerns about the scope of the surveillance.
After the administration on Wednesday declassified more documents about an email mining program, Wyden said they showed the government had “repeatedly made inaccurate statements to Congress” about the effectiveness in countering terrorism.
And details released about the phone records program created new fodder for critics by confirming for the first time that, when investigating one suspected terrorist, the government can also examine records of people who called people who called the targeted individual — netting millions of people’s records in a single request.
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