"[Sen. Wyden] on Edward Snowden, how the NSA misled Congress, and reining in the massive collection" [View all]

[ProSense]

Stopping the "Ever-Expanding Surveillance State"

Sen. Ron Wyden on Edward Snowden, how the NSA misled Congress, and reining in the massive collection of Americans' data.

A little more than two months ago, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the American government is collecting vast amounts of data on millions of citizens. Many were shocked by the leak, but Sen. Ron Wyden was among those who wasn't surprised by what Snowden had disclosed.

From his seat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the senior Democratic senator from Oregon has had an inside—yet classified—view of what America's intelligence agencies are up to. He's been pushing them for increased transparency, particularly on what information they are and aren't collecting on law-abiding American citizens. During the debate over reauthorizing the Patriot Act in 2011, he warned, "When the American people find out how government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry." (Wyden voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, but voted against its reauthorization in 2006.)

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MJ: What is the Obama administration saying to you about your pushback on the NSA's programs, if anything, behind closed doors?

RW: I think there's been dramatic, dramatic progress made in the last eight weeks. If you had asked me eight weeks ago, "Would you have 26 United States senators—a quarter of the Senate—weighing in on these key issues with respect to civil liberties and to privacy? Would you have had the vote in the House, let alone gotten more than 200 votes?", I would have said no way. And it's my own kind of gut feeling now—and I've talked to the president about these issues several times over the last few months and I'm not basing this on any conversation with the president, I don't get into what the president says to me—but I have have this gut feeling that the administration is beginning to rethink, particularly this program that I consider so, so violative of the privacy rights in particular, the bulk phone records collection. I believe they're beginning to rethink this.

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MJ: You've said there are essentially two versions of the Patriot Act: The one the public can read and the way it's interpreted behind closed doors. You've said this means the government can access a lot more than just phone call and email metadata. What do you mean?

RW: The government's collection authority, under the Patriot Act, is basically limitless. They can get the medical records and financial records, gun purchase records. And it also becomes part of another important issue that relates to the FISA court and the rest of the debate. It almost becomes a secret law, like there are two Patriot Acts. The one you read on the laptop essentially leads you to believe that there's some connection to terror and you read that and then you scratch your head and say, "How did they take that authority that's described and use it to conjure up a legal rationale for collecting millions and millions of phone records on law-abiding people?"

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MJ: Then he had to basically admit that he was not telling the truth.

RW: After the hearing, one of my staff went to a secure room and said that this was inaccurate and needed to be corrected. Gen. Clapper's people said they knew it was inaccurate and they still wouldn't correct it. At that point it never, or at least for quite some time, would never have been known. Then there were the (Snowden leaks) and Gen. Clapper started offering one answer after another with respect to why he did it.

The president said that to make all this work, you need to do vigorous oversight. In order to do vigorous oversight, the leadership of the intelligence community has got to be straight with the American people and straight with the Congress. For there to be vigorous oversight, the intelligence community's got to be straight with the American people and the Congress and that has not been the case.

MJ: How do you think what Edward Snowden did has played into all of this, and what do you think of what he did?

RW: It's been a long-standing position for me that when there is a criminal charge—and here you're talking about espionage—I don't get into making comments. What I will tell you is that I feel very strongly, very strongly, that this debate should have begun long, long ago by government officials, by members of Congress and the White House rather than by a contractor.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/senator-ron-wyden-nsa-surveillance-interview