Wyden and Udall: Don’t Believe Intelligence Officials
Last night U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called out the intelligence community in a joint statement.
The release was in response to recent reports from The Guardian that the National Security Agency (NSA) collected U.S. email records in bulk for more than two years under President Barack Obama and still collects and analyzes reams of data from U.S. communications systems.
Basically, the senators question the effectiveness of the NSA’s bulk collection programs and assert that claims made by intelligence officials “should not simply be accepted at face value.”
The senators, who have extensive access to classified information, state that they “spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of [the bulk email collection program’s] effectiveness” before it was shut down that year after evidence was never presented.
Furthermore, they say that “intelligence agencies made statements to both Congress and the Court that significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness,” adding that the disingenuous claims led them “to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program” as well.
“I don’t think collecting millions and millions of Americans’ phone calls — now this is the metadata, this is the time, place, to whom you direct the calls — is making us any safer,” Udall has previously said.
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