NSA to Congress: F@ck Off
WashingtonsBlog.com
January 15, 2014
The NSA Treats Congress Just Like the American People: With Scorn and Disdain
We’ve shown that the NSA has been spying on Congress for some time.
The NSA has never denied that it’s spying on Congress. Instead, the NSA first said:
Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.
And Friday, NSA chief Keith Alexander wrote a letter to Senator Bernie Sanders saying that the NSA cannot reveal whether the agency has been targeting members of Congress in its metadata collection because doing so would violate privacy provisions accorded to civilians in the program:
The telephone metadata program incorporates extraordinary controls to protect Americans’ privacy interests. Among those protections is the condition that NSA can query the metadata only based on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other American elected officials, or any other American without that predicate.
The Rest…HERE
