White House, NSA and Verizon all decline comment;
disclosure comes in wake of media surveillance scandal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order?CMP=ema_565
From CNN:
Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted: "Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement saying, "While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking."
Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year slamming the government's "secret interpretations of public laws."
"We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act," which deals with "business records," they wrote.
"As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says."
Sen. Diane Feinstein, head of the Intelligence Committee, defended the massive surveillance.
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Why should we believe the NSA isn't snooping on Tea Partiers while "countering terrorism."
IRS headquarters reported behind
the assault on Tea Party groups
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