Top Democratic and Republican senators on intelligence panel defend phone snooping
Top Democratic and Republican senators on intelligence panel defend snooping into phone records
Posted on June 6, 2013 at 1:53 pm by Pat Cunningham
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HERE‘s an interesting angle on the political topic of the day:
The top two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said today that the widespread monitoring of phone records revealed by Wednesday’s Guardian report has been going on for years and that Congress is regularly briefed about it.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss also defended the National Security Agency’s request to Verizon for all the metadata about phone calls made within the U.S. and from the U.S. to other countries. They said the information gathered by intelligence on the phone communications is “meta data” used to connect phone lines to terrorists and that it did not contain the content of the phone calls or messages.
“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years,” Feinstein asid. “This renewal is carried out by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] under the business records section of the PATRIOT Act. Therefore, it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress…
“I know that people are trying to get to us,” she said. “This is the reason why the FBI now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. This is the reason for the national counterterrorism center that’s been set up in the time we’ve been active, it’s to ferret this out before it happens. It’s called protecting America.”
(Snip)
Added Chambliss: “This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years … every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.
“To my knowledge, there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint,” he said. “It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years.”
UPDATE: Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham says he’s actually glad about the NSA surveillance:
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