After years of obscure warnings, Wyden gets privacy debate in wake of NSA revelations
by David A. Fahrenthold, to be printed in Monday's Washington Post
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill: For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.
Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information he had learned as a member of the Senate intelligence committee. But Wyden (D-Ore.) was bound by secrecy rules, unable to reveal what he knew.
Everything but his unhappiness had to be classified. So Wyden stuck to speeches that were dire but vague. And often ignored.
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry,” Wyden said on the Senate floor in May 2011.
Two years later, they found out.
The revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — detailing vast domestic-surveillance programs that vacuumed up data on phone calls, e-mails and electronic communications — have filled in the details of Wyden’s concerns.
So he was right. But that is not the same as winning.
In order to change the law and restrict domestic spying, the low-key Wyden still must overcome opposition from the White House and the leadership of both parties in Congress.
“If we don’t take a unique moment in our constitutional history — in our political history — to fix a surveillance system that (is) just off the rails, I think we’ll regret it,” Wyden said in a telephone interview Friday.
Now, in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, Wyden is pressing his case on two fronts.
One uses Congress’s power to ask questions. Wyden has sought to force spy agency leaders to clarify — in public — the nature of their intelligence-gathering on Americans.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. responded to a letter co-authored by Wyden with new details.
Clapper said the government was not using its authority under the USA Patriot Act to gather bulk data on Americans, beyond two programs already disclosed. One gathers data on phone calls. The other, now shut down, gathered data on electronic messages. Clapper also conceded that there had been “compliance problems,” in which the NSA had not complied with the terms of secret-court orders that allowed the data-gathering.
In addition, Wyden is seeking legislative change — including an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court itself.
“It’s the most one-sided legal process in the United States,” Wyden said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that aired Sunday. “I don’t know of any other legal system or court that really doesn’t highlight anything except one point of view.” Wyden said later that lawmakers should seek to “diversify some of the thinking on the court.”
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-years-of-obscure-warnings-wyden-gets-sought-after-privacy-debate-in-wake-of-nsa-revelations/2013/07/28/267efd1a-f573-11e2-861b-70461cc1cd24_singlePage.html
Newsmakers video: https://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SenRon
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