US Senate Panel Pressures NSA on Phone Logs, Guardian Publishes News Leaked Documents
Local Editor
US Senators on Wednesday sharply challenged the National Security Agency's collection of records of all domestic phone calls, even when a recent NSA document was leaked showing details on the way the agency monitors Web browsing around the world.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the chairman Patrick J. Leahy accused the Obama administration officials of overstating the success of the domestic call log program.
He said he had been shown a classified list of "terrorist events" detected through surveillance, and it did not show that "dozens or even several terrorist plots" had been thwarted by the domestic program, the News York Times reported.
"If this program is not effective it has to end. So far, I'm not convinced by what I've seen," Leahy said.
As senators debated the program, The Guardian published on its website a classified 32-page presentation, apparently downloaded by Edward Snowden that describes a separate surveillance activity by the agency.
The new disclosures provided additional details on the scope of the United States government's secret surveillance programs, which have been dragged into public view and public debate by leaks from Snowden.
The top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, asked skeptical questions about the legal basis for the program while criticizing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, for making inaccurate statements to Congress about it in March.
"Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance," Grassley said.
A series of slides describing XKeyscore, dated 2008, make it clear that the security agency system is collecting a huge amount of data on Internet activity around the globe, from chats on social networks to browsing of Web sites and searches on Google Maps.
Source: News Agencies, edited by website team
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