Lawmakers on Wednesday accused US intelligence agencies of trampling on Americans’ privacy rights and threatened to limit the government’s authority to scoop up phone records on a massive scale.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, members from both parties berated senior officials over the collection of bulk phone data as beyond the limits of the US Constitution as well as legislation adopted by Congress.
“I think that very clearly, this program has gone off the tracks legally,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California.
The hearing focused on the government’s far-reaching surveillance activities that have come under intense scrutiny after leaks from a former intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, who revealed the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting phone “meta-data” and trawling through Internet traffic to look for terror suspects.
But senior justice and intelligence officials insisted the data mining of phone records is designed solely to prevent terrorist attacks and that it is reviewed by a secret court while abiding by the Patriot Act adopted by Congress.
“With these programs and other intelligence activities, we are constantly seeking to achieve the right balance between the protection of national security and the protection of privacy and civil liberties,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the committee.
Lawmakers, however, said Congress had amended the Patriot Act to ensure phone or other business records would only be collected on a narrow basis, when government agencies had a specific suspect or threat in mind.
“We amended the Patriot Act to avoid this very same problem,” said John Conyers, the senior-ranking Democrat on the committee, who called the data collection a “serious violation” of the law.
“This is unsustainable, it’s outrageous and must be stopped immediately,” Conyers said.
Venting frustration with the Obama administration’s stance, Republican James Sensenbrenner said the authority for gathering phone data — known as section 215 of the Patriot Act — would not be renewed unless the government changed its approach.
“You have to change how you operate section 215, otherwise you’re not going have it anymore,” he said.
Administration officials told the committee that the phone data allowed spy agencies and the FBI to track down an associate of Najibullah Zazi, who admitted to plotting to bomb the New York City subway.
The officials also said the government was conducting only a relatively small number of searches through the phone data, despite the large volume of telephone records collected, and that it was barred from looking for any information on crimes unrelated to terror threats.
Lawmakers threaten to limit powers of US spy agency
