NSA faces sweeping surveillance review

NSA faces sweeping surveillance review as intelligence chiefs face hostile House

Lawmakers move forward with bill to rein in programs amid signs of a split between White House and intelligence

 Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington

US intelligence agencies were facing an increasingly hostile Congress on Tuesday as lawmakers prepared multiple efforts to rein in a series of surveillance programs from which even the White House was distancing itself.

Director of national intelligence James Clapper and NSA director Keith Alexander were due to testify at an open hearing of the House intelligence committee amid growing signs of a split between the intelligence community and the Obama administration.

The hearing comes just 24 hours after the intelligence chiefs found themselves abandoned by Washington's political establishment, with anonymous administration officials claiming President Obama was unaware of the extent spying on foreign leaders – a practice unexpectedly rebuked by Senate intelligence chair Dianne Feinstein, who has been a significant NSA ally.

Meanwhile, legislative efforts to end bulk collection of Americans’ communications data gathered pace with two complementary bipartisan bills aimed at curbing “a trust deficit” sparked by the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

On Tuesday morning, congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a veteran Wisconsin Republican and author of the Patriot Act, introduced his long-awaited USA Freedom Act, that would stop the NSA’s bulk domestic phone records collection. The legislation would also stop the NSA from searching through its foreign communications databases for identifying information on Americans.

A companion bill in the Senate was also being introduced Tuesday by Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Both bills have already attracted significant support: Sensenbrenner claims 60 co-sponsors, including eight who either opposed or abstained from a July effort in the House to stop the bulk phone records collection, a number that would have swung the earlier vote against the NSA. Both bills will come through the judiciary committees, whose members are far more sceptical of the surveillance activities than the intelligence committees.

“The intelligence community now faces a trust deficit with the American public that compromises its ability to do its job,” Leahy and Sensenbrenner wrote in an op-ed for Politico on Tuesday. “It is not enough to just make minor tweaks around the edges. It is time for real, substantive reform.”

Those bills still face a tough ride through Congress, not least because they are up against Feinstein’s own surveillance legislation which will be marked up, the process by which a congressional committee debates and rewrites proposed legislation, on Tuesday in a closed-door session of the Senate.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has launched a legal action against the NSA’s domestic phone records collection in a New York federal court, threw its support behind the Leahy-Sensenbrenner effort. “The legislation introduced today by Senator Leahy and Representative Sensenbrenner is a true reform bill that rejects the false and dangerous notion that privacy and our fundamental freedoms are incompatible with security,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s surveillance lobbyist.

The first salvo in the fight against Leahy and Sensenbrenner’s bill was due to come on Tuesday afternoon, in the House intelligence committee. Clapper, Alexander, NSA deputy director John C Inglis and deputy attorney general James Cole were due to testify about pending legislative reforms to their broad surveillance powers.

The chairman of that committee, congressman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and former FBI agent, is the NSA’s strongest congressional supporter. He has pledged to introduce legislation that will increase transparency around NSA’s bulk surveillance but leave the surveillance intact.

Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has long opposed the bulk collection, recently attacked Rogers and his ilk as the “business as usual brigade,” who plan on trading transparency for substantive surveillance reform.

Until Monday afternoon, a charter member of that group and staunch ally of Rogers was his Senate counterpart, Dianne Feinstein. But Feinstein unexpectedly pledged that her committee to undertake a “major review into all intelligence collection programs”, a dramatic reversal of the unequivocal and vocal support she has given the NSA in the five months since the Guardian began publishing secret surveillance documents leaked by Snowden.

Feinstein declared herself “totally opposed” to NSA spying on US allies like France and Germany and suggested that the White House was going to ban the practice – something the White House spent Monday evening knocking back.

Her position left many longtime intelligence observers puzzled. NSA spying on foreign leaders is far more traditional than its domestic bulk collection, which Feinstein has not criticized.

Regardless of Feinstein’s motivations, intelligence veterans seemed to understand that the political momentum is not on their side. “We’re really screwed now,” an anonymous NSA official told Foreign Policy magazine. 

Adding to their dilemma, the NSA and the White House have spent days trading and deflecting blame for the major diplomatic embarrassment caused by the revelation that the NSA had spied on the communications of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. The White House has told reporters that it was unaware of the practice, which has left intelligence veterans feeling abandoned.

On Monday, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said an internal reform panel was examining options to curtail spying on foreign allies – raising an expectation that Obama will rein in that relatively traditional NSA surveillance activity. In the background are reports from France, Germany and Spain that NSA collection on those countries has turned broader than typical spycraft, thanks to technological innovation and leeway from US policy.

“This is officially the White House cutting off the intelligence community,” an anonymous senior intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times.

Quotes like that and others raise the prospect of the first major split between the White House and the NSA since Snowden’s revelations began. NSA veterans have bridled in the past at what they consider Obama’s tepid support, but both sides earlier showed support for each other.

The White House has yet to signal support or opposition for the Leahy and Sensenbrenner bills. On the eve of their introduction, congressional aides were unsure how strongly the White House will intervene in the unfolding legislative drama over surveillance reform.

communityhttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/nsa-surveillance-review-intelligence-chiefs-testify