Time for Obama to Pull Back His Out-of-Control Security Apparat
Kurt Opsahl and Trevor Timm:
ANDREA MITCHELL: “Why do you need every telephone number? Why is it such a broad vacuum cleaner approach?”
JAMES CLAPPER: “Well, you have to start someplace.”
—NBC Meet the Press, this past Sunday
Concerned about the surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, last year Senator Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. a simple question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"…
DNI Clapper’s answer was simple: "No, sir… not wittingly."
This just is not true. We’ve known for years… and now we know that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued an order in April requiring Verizon to hand over all call records…. DNI Clapper’s statement was not the truth.
On Sunday… Clapper… claimed it was the “least untruthful manner by saying no.”… "And this has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too-- too cute by half. But it is-- there are honest differences on the semantics of what-- when someone says "collection" to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him."…
“[C]ollect” has a very different meaning to them than it does the rest of us. Under Department of Defense regulations, information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component,” and “data acquired by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it has been processed into intelligible form.”… NSA can intercept and store communications in its database, then have an algorithm search them for key words and analyze the metadata without ever considering the communications “collected.”…
All of this would be amusing if the Administration’s main argument to defend the NSA’s massive spying program is that Congress has been informed….
Congress has been deceived… DNI Clapper and the Administration should come clean on how, when, and why…
