First a review of some recent history. The Director of the DNI (the Dept that the NSA reports to) apparently doesn't much care for the "oversight" from the those pesky Senators.
That, or he takes them for a bunch of dolts ... who won't follow-up on his bland reassurances ... (Director Clapper could be right on that one?)
Clapper: I gave 'erroneous' answer because I forgot about Patriot Act
Intelligence chief tries to explain false Senate testimony by saying he 'simply didn't think' of NSA efforts to collect phone data
by Spencer Ackerman, guardian.co.uk -- 2 July 2013
The most senior US intelligence official told a Senate oversight panel that he “simply didn’t think” of the National Security Agency’s efforts to collect the phone records of millions of Americans when he testified in March that it did “not wittingly” snoop on their communications.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, made the comments in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee, released in full for the first time on Tuesday.
[...]
In the full letter, Clapper attempted to explain the false testimony by saying that his recollection failed him. “I simply didn’t think of Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” he wrote to committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California) on 21 June, referring to the legal provision cited to justify the mass collection of Americans’ phone data, first disclosed by the Guardian.
Clapper is under intense pressure from legislators displeased by his March testimony to the Senate intelligence committee’s Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) that the NSA did “not wittingly” collect, as Wyden put it, “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
[...]
"erroneous", "simply didn’t think", "not wittingly"
Hey those are great words you want to have on your Resume ... (especially if your Job is primarily to "obfuscate" certain activities from every seeing the light of day.)
But since President Obama thought better of, his first instinct to put his Director of Obfuscation, in charge of his 'Sunlight on NSA' "Review Group" -- I won't belabor the point ...
DNI Clapper won’t control spying review, White House says
Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News August -- 13, 2013
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But still -- when powerful Directors use "euphemism" to nonchalantly excuse their lying to Congress,
Houston, we may still have a problem!
“Not wittingly” is just another way of saying ... ?