WASHINGTON –Party lines are blurring as red and blue are becoming one with Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden and Republicans such as Jim Sensenbrenner and Susan Collins now in favor of significant changes in the nation’s vast surveillance system.
Sens. Feinstein and Wyden and Rep. Sensenbrenner are among many senators heading up legislation to put such amendments — limiting the reach of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Americans and others — in place. This week has been a busy one for these cybersecurity issues in Congress.
Committee action on Feinstein’s bill got under way this week. And Sensenbrenner introduced his legislation in the House on Tuesday.
At the same time, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander addressed members of the House about the reports of monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
Speaking at a CATO Institute conference earlier in October, Wyden, D-Ore., said he wanted to confront what he called the “business-as-usual brigade.” The objective of this so-called brigade, Wyden said, is to “fog up the surveillance debate and convince Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly-intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, the real problem is all that sensationalistic media.”
Wyden said the NSA’s end goal is to ensure that any surveillance reform is only skin deep and he wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“We’ve heard that surveillance of Americans’ phone records, a.k.a. metadata, is not actually surveillance at all: it’s simply the collection of bits of information. We’ve been told that falsehoods aren’t really falsehoods,” Wyden said at the libertarian think tank.
It is likely to take some time to finalize the language of the Feinstein bill. Feinstein said earlier this month that the bill would call for increased oversight and transparency of the surveillance program.
And senators like Wyden seem ready to push on with proposed reform in the face of continuous pushback from the NSA and others who argue that the snooping is necessary to protect America from another terrorist assault similar to the 9/11 attacks.
On the House side, Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., though an original author of the Patriot Act, has remained critical of the surveillance system. His legislation would completely do away with parts of the program.
“The logic it uses to support bulk collection of phone records would also support the bulk collection of other records, raising the question: what other records is the government collecting in bulk and just how deeply is the government intruding into our daily lives?” he said during the CATO conference.
Recent revelations of the expanded NSA surveillance could change the way members of Congress perceive the system, especially how the term “relevance” is used in reference to legitimizing the collection of phone records and emails.
“The government claims it needs the haystack to find the needle, but gathering the haystack – making it larger – without the knowledge that it contains the needle is precisely what the relevant standard was supposed to prevent,” Sensenbrenner said.
Feinstein has been fairly tight-lipped about the progress of her bill. But in a statement Monday she expressed her opposition of the NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of America’s allies, including Merkel.
She said the Senate Intelligence Committee was “not satisfactorily informed” of NSA surveillance, all the more reason for a sense of urgency of in producing a bill proposing changes to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act — FISA — which would restrict NSA’s reach.
“I think that it is totally inappropriate. There’s absolutely no justification for our country to be collecting intelligence information of some of the leaders of some of our closest allies,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said. “I think the bigger question is whether the president was aware we were collecting intelligence on some of the leaders of some of our closest allies,” Collins said. “If the President didn’t know he definitely should have known. I would think that if the President was not informed of this program, that he would be demanding resignations of those who should have informed him.”
The White House and members of Congress are meeting with German government officials this week to discuss security issues.
“We’re making progress” was Sen. Dan Coats’s, D-Ind., response during the closed door committee mark up of Feinstein bill on Tuesday.