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| Robert S. Litt, general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. Six weeks after a leaked document exposed the scope of the government's monitoring of Americans' phone records, the House Judiciary Committee calls on key administration figures from the intelligence world to answer questions about the sweeping government surveillance of Americans in war on terrorism. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of
Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National
Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And
they threatened to curtail the government's surveillance authority.
Top
Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program
was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the
possibility that they could build similar databases of people's credit
card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches.
The
clash on Capitol Hill undercut President Barack Obama's assurances that
Congress had fully understood the dramatic expansion of government
power it authorized repeatedly over the past decade.
The
House Judiciary Committee hearing also represented perhaps the most
public, substantive congressional debate on surveillance powers since
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Previous debates have been largely
theoretical and legalistic, with officials in the Bush and Obama
administrations keeping the details hidden behind the cloak of
classified information.
That changed last
month when former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents
to the Guardian newspaper revealing that the NSA collects every
American's phone records, knowing that the overwhelming majority of
people have no ties to terrorism.
Civil rights
groups have warned for years that the government would use the USA
Patriot Act to conduct such wholesale data collection. The government
denied it.
The Obama administration says it
needs a library of everyone's phone records so that when it finds a
suspected terrorist, it can search its archives for the suspect's
calling habits. The administration says the database was authorized
under a provision in the Patriot Act that Congress hurriedly passed
after 9/11 and reauthorized in 2005 and 2010.
The
sponsor of that bill, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said Wednesday
that Congress meant only to allow seizures directly relevant to national
security investigations. No one expected the government to obtain every
phone record and store them in a huge database to search later.
As
Deputy Attorney General James Cole explained why that was necessary,
Sensenbrenner cut him off and reminded him that his surveillance
authority expires in 2015.
"And unless you realize you've got a problem," Sensenbrenner said, "that is not going to be renewed."
He
was followed by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who picked up where his
colleague left off. The problem, he said, is that the administration
considers "everything in the world" relevant to fighting terrorism.
Later,
Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, asked whether the NSA could build
similar databases of everyone's Internet searches, hotel records and
credit card transactions.
Robert S. Litt,
general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence,
didn't directly answer, saying it would depend on whether the government
believed those records - like phone records - to be relevant to
terrorism investigations.
After the phone surveillance became public, Obama assured Americans that Congress was well aware of what was going on.
"When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program," he said.
Whether
lawmakers willingly kept themselves in the dark or were misled, it was
apparent Wednesday that one of the key oversight bodies in Congress
remained unclear about the scope of surveillance, more than a decade
after it was authorized.
The Judiciary
Committee's senior Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, noted that
the panel had "primary jurisdiction" over the surveillance laws that
were the foundation for the NSA programs. Yet one lawmaker, Rep. Ted
Poe, R-Texas, said some members of Congress wouldn't have known about
the NSA surveillance without the sensational leaks: "Snowden, I don't
like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he
hadn't told us."
The NSA says it only looks at numbers as part of narrow terrorism investigations, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
For
the first time, NSA deputy director John C. Inglis disclosed Wednesday
that the agency sometimes conducts what's known as three-hop analysis.
That means the government can look at the phone data of a suspect
terrorist, plus the data of all of his contacts, then all of those
people's contacts, and finally, all of those people's contacts.
If
the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could
allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when
investigating one suspected terrorist.
Rep
Randy Forbes, R-Va., said such a huge database was ripe for government
abuse. When Inglis said there was no evidence of that, Forbes
interrupted:
"I said I wasn't going to yell at
you and I'm going to try not to. That's exactly what the American
people are worried about," he said. "That's what's infuriating the
American people. They're understanding that if you collect that amount
of data, people can get access to it in ways that can harm them."
The
government says it stores everybody's phone records for five years.
Cole explained that because the phone companies don't keep records that
long, the NSA had to build its own database.
Rep.
Steve King, R-Iowa, asked why the government didn't simply ask the
phone companies to keep their data longer. That way, the government
could ask for specific information, rather than collecting information
on millions of innocent people.
Inglis said it would be challenging, but the government was looking into it.
Near
the end of the hearing, Litt struck a compromising tone. He said
national security officials had tried to balance privacy and security.
"If
the people in Congress decide that we've struck that balance in the
wrong place, that's a discussion we need to have," he said.
Obama,
too, has said he welcomes the debate over surveillance. But his
administration never wanted the debate to be quite so specific.
That
was obvious when Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asked Litt whether he
really believed the government could keep such a vast surveillance
program a secret forever.
"Well," Litt replied, "we tried."
