So government spying on Americans and collecting their phone data to be searched later as needed is so vital to America's security that when Edward Snowden revealed the program it was claimed he put the country in danger.
But apparently the spying program wasn't actually important enough for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to even remember it when he was asked about it by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2013. Oh no, he wasn't lying when he denied that the NSA was illegally collecting all that communications data. He'd simply forgotten about it:
Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper wasn’t lying when he wrongly told Congress in 2013 that the government does not “wittingly” collect information about millions of Americans, according to his top lawyer.
He just forgot.
"This was not an untruth or a falsehood. This was just a mistake on his part," Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency on Friday.
“We all make mistakes.”
If you recall, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper directly if the NSA collected "any type of data at all on millions of Americans."
"No sir," Clapper responded. "There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."
Of course a few months later, Snowden's revelations showed this to be a complete lie, er, what?, a
senior moment?
What makes this claim of Clapper having just forgotten the surveillance program so ridiculous is that they were warned the day before that Wyden was going to ask this question and had a chance to prepare a truthful and complete answer, instead of an answer that was complete and deliberate hooey:
Litt on Friday said that Clapper merely did not have a chance to prepare an answer for Wyden and forgot about the phone records program when asked about it on the spot.
"We were notified the day before that Sen. Wyden was going to ask this question and the director of national intelligence did not get a chance to review it," Litt said.
"He was hit unaware by the question," Litt added. "After this hearing I went to him and I said, 'Gee, you were wrong on this.' And it was perfectly clear that he had absolutely forgotten the existence of the 215 program."
Instead, Litt said, Clapper had been thinking about separate programs authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA has used to collect massive amounts of foreigners’ Internet data. The law explicitly prohibits the government from gathering the same kind of data about Americans, unless t is "incidental."
"If you read his answer it is perfectly clear that he was thinking about the 702 program," Litt said. "When he is talking about not wittingly collecting, he is talking about incidental collection."
Litt, he said, also erred after the hearing by not sending a letter to the panel to correct the mistake.
"I wish we’d done that at the time," he said on Friday.
So ridiculous, so contemptuous of the millions of people who are having their privacy invaded so casually, illegally and without any accountability.
(via)