I'm not sure if this is a sincere mea culpa or not.
Even the head of the U.S. intelligence community now believes that its collection and storage of millions of call records was kept too secret for too long.
The American public and most members of Congress were kept in the dark for years about a secret U.S. program to collect and store such records of American citizens on a massive scale.The government’s legal interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act that granted the authority for this dragnet collection was itself a state secret.
How human of him, it's time to come clean after you've been found out.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Ben Wizner—a legal adviser to Snowden and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project—said he agreed with Clapper’s current assessment. “If Clapper is suggesting that the American people should have been consulted before the NSA engaged in a mass phone call tracking program, I emphatically agree,” he said “Whether we would have consented to that at the time will never be known, we are now having a debate in Congress and in the courts that we should have had then.”
Why attempt to close the barn door when your horse is three counties away?
“I was not even thinking of what he was asking about, which is of course we now all know as section 215 of the Patriot Act governing the acquisition and storage of telephony business records metadata,” Clapper said. “Wasn’t even thinking of that.” The director of national intelligence said he thought Wyden’s question was actually about section 702 of FISA.
“The allegation about my lying and committing perjury I think are disproven by my labored amplification when I said, ‘if there is, it’s inadvertent collection,’ meaning when we’re collecting overseas under section 702, and if we inadvertently collect which we may not know at the time, U.S. persons data, that’s what I meant by inadvertent. That comment would make absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of section 215.”
I've never experienced a mudbath. I think I just got one.