Politico – by TIM MAK and BURGESS EVERETT
The top two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said today that the widespread monitoring of phone records revealed by Wednesday’s Guardian report has been going on for years and that Congress is regularly briefed about it.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss also defended the National Security Agency’s request to Verizon for all the metadata about phone calls made within the U.S. and from the U.S. to other countries. They said the information gathered by intelligence on the phone communications is “meta data” used to connect phone lines to terrorists and that it did not contain the content of the phone calls or messages.
“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years,” Feinstein asid. “This renewal is carried out by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] under the business records section of the PATRIOT Act. Therefore, it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.
Feinstein said she could not answer whether other phone companies have had their records sifted through as Verizon has.
“I know that people are trying to get to us,” she said. “This is the reason why the FBI now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. This is the reason for the national counterterrorism center that’s been set up in the time we’ve been active. its to ferret this out before it happens. “It’s called protecting America.”
Feinstein wouldn’t say whether Congress should an investigation into who leaked the information.
“Give me a little bit of time. I saw this maybe an hour ago. I haven’t had the opportunity to do the due diligence,” said Feinstein, who said that when she came to her office this morning, there was a TV crew waiting for her.
Added Chambliss: “This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years … every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.
“To my knowledge, there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint,” he said. “It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years.”
Feinstein and ranking member Kit Bond (R-Mo.) in 2010 and Chambliss in 2011 gave senators the opportunity to view classified reports on the FISA-related activities.
The letters to senators are “sent at specific dates that were prior to each renewal of the business records section,” she said. The letters inform senators that they can view the classified report on “roving authority for electronic surveillance” as well as “the acquisition of business records that are relevant to investigations to protect against international terrorism or espionage.”
The business records section of the Patriot Act is the provision that the Verizon data would have been collected under.
Feinstein said that members of her committee, which include those like Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), “should have” closely reviewed the classified documents.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said the intelligence committee, which he chairs, will talk to relevant players as soon as this afternoon.
“If it What it appears to be in the paper is a court order for business records that include metadata not content, not monitoring, not anything else,” Rogers said.
He said its probably a lawful program. He doesn’t know yet.
“There are legal programs. We want to make sure this comports with the legal programs that the committees have been briefed on,” Rogers said. “Again, right now what it appears to be is a court order for business records. That in and of itself is not unusual.”
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also defended the administration.
“What Chairman Rogers and I are going to be doing, we’re going to be doing a deep dig on this issue,” he said. “This is done pursuant to law, pursuant to the Supreme Court that ruled this was constitutional.”
He said to keep the information from being misused it requires sign offs from the Justice Department and a judge.
“It’s legal, it’s constitutional, you have oversight, there is a tremendous amount of oversight and when you have the courts – before you didn’t have the courts,” Ruppersberger said. “I know as a Democrat before on the Intelligence Committee, the Bush administration didn’t want court orders at all.”
The Maryland Democrat also invoked the bombings at the Boston Marathon as evidence that this surveillance is needed.
“We just had a serious situation that occurred in Massachusetts and people were saying why didn’t we get more , well this is part of the system that we use because of the volume that we have to deal with to find people who want to attack us and kill us,” Ruppersberger said.
“Now we have to deal with the perception issue because the media constantly saying the NSA is listening to you and that’s not true at all,” Ruppersberger added.
Ginger Gibson and Jake Sherman contributed to this report.
How about this America, Let’s SUE NSA for breaching my, yours, 1st Amendment Right. Any Lawyers out there who believe that our 1st Amendment has been violated? Do WE ALL have a Case? Please let us know.
I’m sorry, but every time I look at this woman’s face, I just want to vomit.
Excuse me….PPPPUUUKKKKEEEE!!!!!………..
My Fellow Americans:
We have been warned from those which our Founding Fathers drew their inspiration for our Republic when considering traitors and sellouts:
Marcus Tulius Cicero (Born106 – Murdered: 43 BC – For criticising Marc Anthony) – A Roman Philosopher, Statesmen, Lawyer, Orator, Consul, and a staunch Constitutional Republican:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within!
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly, but the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, for his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so this it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to fear.
The traitor is the plague.”
JD – US Marines – And so,… it has come to pass…. the plague, Feinstein, Polsi, Obama, ad most of the US Fed Gov’t has rendered our body politic impotent, and beyond resurrection,… this leaves the only option available to Patriots – abolish, arrest, replace, and then institute “new guards for their future security”.
You are enlightened and your point is very well presented. The likes of Pelosi and Feinstein are clueless goverment prostitutes and traitors to what is left of this republic
Violationor your propery and posessions and papers another constitution violation
Diane Feinkenstein looks like disease, cancer, and vomit all rolled up into one. Her eyes squint and blink as if she had a syringe stuck inside her pupil. And the way that loose throat wattle of hers shakes when she nods her head leads me to doubt she’s even a woman. She’s Dorian Grey’s sister’s mirror in the attic. She’s gotta be some kind of alien. She reminds of of one of that Stephen King movie where the alien has to keep changing bodies because of deterioration from rot when the host’s body is dead.
I guess she’s gonna read this, but oh well. Whatever.
WRONG!!!
It’s called PROTECTING YOUR @SS, B#TCH!!!
Hi Guys,
it makes me ill to see this type of sophistry allowed.
I will only spy on you if you do wrong. Do wrong according to who?
Yeah lets trust a politician to do the right thing…
I love the Cicero quote and for mine the last time a polly did a good thing was back in Roman times (Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney(?) et al excepted).
Please fight these Fascists in the US I doubt we have the moral standing or the legal precedent here in Australia.
Ms Feinstein if you do get to read this please don’t come to Oz as you are not welcome here.
1984. The department of homeland insecurity has failed one again. It failed to prevent the Boston bombing. And their are many false flag prevented terrorist attacks that were set up to be caught to push America deeper into this quest to line the pockets of private security firms like the TSA. and many others. Wait till the Internet becomes filtered by some private company who has ties to a politician who pushes for a bill to make it ‘secure’. Remember CISPA. It may be ok for some to be monitored, but this goes further than that idea. The US is just a stick bending until its broken. And when it brakes, 1984.
Even Joe McCarthy might gave regarded this as being un-American.
GOVT LIE they have spied on you for 7 years short video fox news Judge bit.ly/11wHtg0
Its a rather amazing claim that they only gather data on “bad guys”, when they have yet to catch a single bad guy.
You obviously cant expect the truth from anyone who is trying to destroy freedom and create a communist world government.
Protect America …… ship Feinstein to Afghanistan.
The Fed’s or NSA need to start listening in on all of the government scum bags in Washington. I know for a fact they will catch a lot of Terrorist’s in the act. DeFi is one of the terrorist’s that is on the list.
OFF subject…if you want to torture someone, have DeFi stand in front of you naked while your eyes are locked in the open possition….
Feinstein is acting as an agent of the money changers, meaning she’s an enemy alien fifth columnist. Sayanim by any other name. I thought these people were supposed to be arrested and then put in front of a firing squad?
Fienstein’s husband just got something like 65 million wonder if she is going to use that money to lobbly for gun control and pay people to back her up