NSA Senate Hearing: DiFi Not Amused

The Guardian Liveblog of Senate Intelligence Committee

Feinstein says metadata collection does not amount to surveillance.

"Much of the press has called this a surveillance program. It is not... the metadata collection has been described as surveillance," Feinstein says. "Please describe what is collected as metadata."

Cole, the deputy attorney general, reassures Feinstein that metadata is harmless because it's only the number, date and length of each call.

However metadata can be "much more intrusive than content," as Jane Mayer and others have reported.

The senator/school marm has repeated this riff over and over again.

When the interchanges of this hearing are compared with those of hearings held just after the Snowden revelations it seem fair to say that the tone of the senator's questions are considerably less respectful. Of course there is the glaring exception of the NSA den mother, Senator Feinstein.

Wyden asks Alexander whether the NSA has ever collected cell site information in bulk.

Alexander says on 25 July, Clapper provided a written response that "under section 215, NSA is not receiving cell site location data and has no current plans to do so."

Wyden says he didn't answer the question. "Has the NSA ever collected cell site information?"

Alexander says he answered the question. "Please allow me to continue." He reads a statement and mentions classification restrictions.

Wyden says he did not answer, and if it's a matter of classification that's one thing, but that he, Wyden, intends to keep asking about whether the NSA has ever collected cell site information.

Work is underway on getting NSA reform legislation through congress.

NSA reform bill to trim back US surveillance unveiled in Congress

Four senators at the vanguard of bipartisan efforts to rein in US government spying programs announced the most comprehensive package of surveillance reforms so far presented on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

The draft bill represented the first sign that key Republican and Democratic figures in the Senate are beginning to coalesce around a raft of proposals to roll back the powers of the National Security Agency in the wake of top-secret disclosures made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"The disclosures over the last 100 days have caused a sea change in the way the public views the surveillance system," said Democratic senator Ron Wyden, unveiling the bill at a press conference alongside Republican Rand Paul.

The article has the details of the bills proposals. They definitely represent more change than the NSA or the Obama administration would like to see happen.

It would prohibit the NSA's bulk collection phone records of Americans under section 215 of the Patriot Act, the most controversial aspect of US surveillance revealed by documents supplied by Snowden to the Guardian.

The bill would also prevent a similar data trawl of internet communication records, which was stopped in 2011, and definitively close a so-called "backdoor" that potentially enables the NSA to intercept the internet communications of Americans swept up in a program protected by Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act.

If made law, the act would require a "constitutional advocate" to be introduced into the opaque court process, so that the government could be challenged on privacy grounds in significant or precedent-setting cases. It would insert an adversarial dimension to a court process that is currently one-sided in favour of the government.

This is a long way from anything actually becoming law. The thing that looks interesting to me at this point is the bipartisan composition of the bills sponsors.