The Washington Post has a background piece on the building debate between the administration and its congressional supporters and it congressional critics of the NSA data collection programs. The divisions are not at all along party lines. It looks like the bipartisan era the the president has been pleading for has finally arrived.
Lawmakers say obstacles limited oversight of NSA’s telephone surveillance program
The Obama administration points to checks and balances from Congress as a key rationale for supporting bulk collection of Americans’ telephone communications data, but several lawmakers responsible for overseeing the program in recent years say that they felt limited in their ability to challenge its scope and legality.
The administration argued Friday that lawmakers were fully informed of the surveillance program and voted to keep it in place as recently as 2011. Officials say they have taken unusual steps to make information available to Congress, and committee leaders say they have carefully examined the National Security Agency’s data collection.
Yet some other members of the intelligence and judiciary committees paint a different picture.
They describe regular classified briefings in which intelligence officials would not volunteer details if questions were not asked with absolute precision.
Unlike typical congressional hearings that feature testimony from various sides of a debate, the briefings in 2010 and 2011 on the telephone surveillance program were by definition one-sided affairs, with lawmakers hearing only from government officials steeped in the legal and national security arguments for aggressive spying.
The chairs of the two congressional intelligence committees, one Republican and the other Democrat, are staunch defenders of the NSA and its programs. They claim that members of congress have been given repeated opportunities for briefings and information. Congress has twice voted to reauthorize these programs since Obama has been in office. On the other hand we have senators Wyden and Udall saying that they have had concerns and reservations all along and have been prohibited from clearly expressing them to the public.
Since 9/11 anything about security and terrorism have been radioactive issues. Politicians with their well developed survival instincts usually avoid getting close to such topics if they can. We now have a group of senators and representatives who have decided to take an aggressive posture demanding more accountability and protection for privacy. The bulk of them however, are likely trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. It is pretty clear that Security is no longer the unquestionable apple pie issue that it was.
Nobody will be able to conclusively sort out exactly what has happened with oversight and accountability during the past several years. The important issue is what happens going forward. The president says that he wants to increase congressional participation and provide the public with more information about the NSA programs. I watched his news conference on Friday. His proposals were too vague and general to know just is going to happen. Congress is an equal branch of the government. They have the responsibility to hold the executive branch accountable. We the voters have the responsibility for holding them accountable in doing that.