Lawmakers caught off guard
Intelligence Agency ‘backtracks’ on sharing sweep estimate
WASHINGTON, June 10, (Agencies): For more than a year, US intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.
This week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National Security Agency’s most sweeping espionage.
“The NSA has made Herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate,” Dan Coats, a career Republican politician appointed by Republican President Donald Trump as the top US intelligence official, testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.
Coats said “it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a US person’s communications may be collected” under the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be in the millions.
The statement ran counter to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting reforms to Section 702 said.
Representative John Conyers, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said that for many months intelligence agencies “expressly promised” members of both parties to deliver the estimated number to them.
Senior intelligence officials had also previously said an estimate could be delivered. In March, then NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, said “yes” when asked by a Reuters reporter if an estimate would be provided this year.
“We’re working on that with the Congress and we’ll come to a satisfactory resolution, because we have to,” said Ledgett, who has since retired from public service.
Coats