Senators Ron Wyden, Dianne Feinstein, and Pat Roberts in an Intelligence Committee meeting.
Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have been warning for more than two years of the massive dragnet the NSA has been conducting on phone and Internet records, revealed last week by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The two senators, who were briefed on the program as members of the Intelligence Committee, were hampered by the secret classification of the program; they couldn't speak in specifics. But now that the program has been declassified, they're free not only to talk about specifics of the program, but to act on it. That's what they're doing next week when they will
introduce legislation to put limits on the surveillance program.
"The NSA's collection of millions of Americans' phone call records is the type of overreach I have warned about for years," Udall said. "This legislation strikes the right balance in protecting our homeland while also respecting our Constitution." [...]
The Udall-Wyden proposed bill would require a presidential administration to furnish specific evidence to a judge—likely in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court—that there are credible reasons to believe a person is linked to terrorism or espionage before officials could broadly collect phone records.
Presently, federal officials are casting a much broader net.
As the
law currently stands, the standard Udall and Wyden want to establish
should be in effect: Sec. 215 specifies that data collected should be "relevant to an authorized investigation." It's that relevancy, or in Fourth Amendment terms, "probable cause," that appears to have been set aside and that Wyden and Udall want to reinforce.
It doesn't seem too much to ask that the government be compelled to follow the plain language of the existing law.