Members of the House Judiciary Committee took turns bashing intelligence officials for the wide spread surveillance programs that collect the phone records of millions of Americans and threatened legislative action to take away the authority used to conduct the surveillance, reports the Washington Post.
Officials from the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence attempted to justify the program to a bipartisan group of legislators that were at times combative.
"This is unsustainable, it's outrageous and must be stopped immediately," Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said.
The intelligence officials found that the climate in the hearing was very different than it had been a month ago when they met with the House Intelligence Committee. James Cole, an official with the Justice Department, found himself trying to explain how collecting "metadata" isn't a violation of privacy, according to the Associated Press.
"We are constantly seeking to achieve the right balance between the protection of national security and the protection of privacy and civil liberties," Cole said.
"You've already violated the law as far as I am concerned," Conyers responded.
Rep. Jams Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., one of the sponsors of the USA Patriot Act, said that when he wrote the legislation that it was never intended to allow for the government to seize the phone records of average Americans. Instead it was supposed to be used only to aid in specific instances directly related to issues of national security, reports the Associated Press.
The Obama administration and intelligence officials have made the argument that the "metadata" they are collecting and storing - phone numbers that are called, time, and duration of the call - is not private information.
"The government is stockpiling sensitive personal data on a grand scale," Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said. "Intelligence officers, contractors and personnel only need a rubber-stamp warrant from the FISA court to then learn virtually everything there is to know about an American citizen."
A letter is going to be delivered to President Barack Obama on Thursday from a diverse group of tech companies and privacy advocacy groups - including Apple, Google, Facebook, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union - asking the government to consider making its surveillance programs more transparent, according to The New York Times.
The letter is asking that the government allow companies be allowed to disclose how many times the NSA secretly requests data from them and what the sort of data is being shared. Notably the letter does not demand an end to the NSA surveillance programs; instead its purpose seems to be to pull back the curtain and open up a discussion among the American people about whether such information should be shared or not, reports The New York Times.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., said in an interview with The New York Times that he intends to introduce legislation that would disclose surveillance programs much in the way that the letter is demanding. Franken thinks that even though the White House has defended the surveillance programs up until this point that they would be open to disclosing some details.
"I think that if there were greater transparency, Americans would have a better understanding of these programs," Franken said.
