Keep pushing, Sen. Wyden.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has proven to be well worth listening to when it comes to the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans. Before the Snowden leaks confirmed it, Wyden was warning that the NSA's spying activities went far beyond what the law allowed and what the American public was led to believe. He just had to make his warning oblique and vague because the information he had was classifed; he was bound by law not to release it. Here's something else Wyden has been talking about for months and months: the bulk collection of cellphone location information. He
asked about it again in a hearing Thursday in the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Speaking to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, Wyden asked, “Director Alexander, Senators Udall, Heinrich and I and about two dozen other senators have asked in the past whether the NSA has ever collected or made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site information in bulk. What would be your response to that?”
Alexander implied with his answer that Congress would be aware if the NSA had done so. But his response also recalls Wyden’s strained exchange with Clapper back in March [during which Clapper lied to the committee]. [...]
It seems unlikely that Wyden would be so insistent that “the American people have a right to know” if the NSA has ever collected or planned to collect cell phone geolocation data if he did not believe, based on information he receives as a member of the intelligence committee, that they had. Alexander also does not answer in the negative, he merely says that Congress and the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court would know if they had. Which may be why Wyden is asking the question in the first place.
Congress could very well know that, and probably does. But can't say so publicly because that information is classified. More reading between the line, as
Marcy Wheeler does, essentially confirms that at the very least the NSA has plans to sweep up location information in bulk, if it's not already doing it.
The hearing came in the midst of some interesting new context-setting. That includes the release of cold war-era information showing the extent of the NSA's domestic spying in the bad old days. They spied on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Whitney Young, on Muhammed Ali, journalists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker, and Sens. Howard Baker and Frank Church—the man behind NSA and CIA reforms in the 70s, including the creation of the current Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. More current comes in the form of an inspector general's report detailing the so-called LOVEINT spying first reported this summer. The IG reported on 12 instances in which NSA employees illegally spied on people they were personally involved with.
Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein seems still to be operating on the premise that the main problem here is "that the public has a misperception and that must be changed,” not that the NSA—under her "oversight"—has been veering back to the bad old days, far exceeding its legal authority. Fortunately, her counterpart Patrick Leahy (D-VT) in the Judiciary Committee is not nearly so sanguine. With half a chance, and with Wyden's continued agitating, we might actually get another round of NSA reforms.