NSA unable to deny
tracking of lawmakers

The National Security Agency was unwilling to give a straight answer to a senator's question as to whether the agency engages in covert collection of the personal data of members of Congress as the agency fights to hold onto the vast surveillance powers it secretly grasped, but that were eventually exposed by Edward Snowden.

The agency, in response to press queries concerning a question posed in a letter by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, issued this statement:

“NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons. NSA is fully committed to transparency with Congress. Our interaction with Congress has been extensive both before and since the media disclosures began last June.

“We are reviewing Senator Sanders’s letter now, and we will continue to work to ensure that all members of Congress, including Senator Sanders, have information about NSA’s mission, authorities, and programs to fully inform the discharge of their duties.”

Sanders on Friday asked NSA Director Keith Alexander whether the agency has monitored the phone calls, emails and Internet traffic of members of Congress and other elected officials. “Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” Sanders asked in a letter. The term "spying" includes, he said, the gathering of metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or the collection of any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business?

Sanders said he was “deeply concerned” by disclosures that federal intelligence agencies harvested the records of phone calls, emails and web activity of millions of "innocent Americans" without any reason to even suspect involvement in illegal activities. He also cited reports that the United States eavesdropped on the leaders of Germany, Mexico, Brazil and other allies.

Sanders said that while America “must be vigilant and aggressive in protecting the American people from the very real danger of terrorist attacks,” the nation must beware data dragnet activities described by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon as "almost Orwellian."

Sanders has introduced legislation to put strict limits on the sweeping powers used by the NSA and the FBI to secretly track the telephone calls of millions of Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

The measure would put limits on records that may be searched. Authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect. Sanders’ bill also would put an end to open-ended court orders that have resulted in wholesale data mining by the NSA and the FBI. Instead, the government would be required to provide reasonable suspicion to justify searches for each record or document that it wants to examine.