The recent release of National Security Agency surveillance...
The recent release of National Security Agency surveillance documents revealed behaviors that suggest bulk collection of phone records should end, said Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in a statement Monday (http://1.usa.gov/1elL5sO). “The government’s misrepresentations inevitably led to…
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the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court being consistently misinformed as it made binding rulings on the meaning of U.S. surveillance law,” said the senators, members of the Intelligence Committee. “This underscores our concern that intelligence agencies’ assessments and descriptions about particular collection programs -- even significant ones -- are not always accurate.” The documents released last week (CD Sept 12 p11) show “ineptitude and not malice” on the part of the NSA, which if true makes the programs questionably effective, they said. These NSA violations of court orders, allegedly made in ignorance, raise the “potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs,” Udall and Wyden said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence defended its program and how it’s trying to reduce concerns. “As the Court’s opinion clearly shows, there were compliance incidents that were discovered by NSA, and resolved four years ago,” an ODNI spokesman told us in a statement. “Despite the fact that those incidents were largely the result of the complexity of technological systems, we know that they raise concerns about civil liberties and privacy and the protection of US persons data. By continuing to declassify and release information about the Intelligence Community’s activities, while protecting valuable sources and methods, we hope that over time we will alleviate those concerns. It’s important that Americans know that the intelligence community is committed to protecting our nation and does not have the wherewithal nor the resources to snoop on Americans.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pointed to these understanding gaps last week (CD Sept 13 p9). “These gaps in understanding led, in turn, to unintentional misrepresentations in the way the collection was described to the FISC,” Clapper said then in a statement (http://1.usa.gov/1eehimy). “As discussed in the documents, there was no single cause of the [compliance] incidents and, in fact, a number of successful oversight, management, and technology processes in place operated as designed and uncovered these matters.” Clapper said there were a “handful” of such compliance issues, resolved four years ago.