Quantifying the numbers of Americans being inadvertently spied upon could require the intelligence community to be even more invasive than it is now, the nation’s top intelligence official said Monday.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2588033
“If such an estimate were easy to do, and explainable, without compromise, we would’ve done it a long time ago,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told reporters in Washington. “We’re looking at several options right now, none of which are optimum. They all have drawbacks.”
“The irony is … to actually run an accurate number, we’d have to actually be more invasive and identify more U.S. persons,” Clapper said.
Clapper last week received a letter co-signed by 14 House lawmakers seeking to find the number of Americans being surveilled under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The 2008 revision to the law allows for the “incidental” collection of data about Internet activity. That collection regime came under scrutiny in 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the agency was collecting a massive amount of data through a computer network named PRISM.
“The leadership of the intelligence community has repeatedly assured us that collection of domestic communications under this authority is merely ‘incidental,’ and that the government complies with the law’s requirement to ‘minimize the acquisition’ of U.S. person information,” lawmakers wrote in their Friday letter. “Even a rough estimate of the number of U.S. persons impacted by these programs will help us to evaluate these claims.
The law is set to expire at the end of next year if Congress does not renew it. “We require your assistance in making a determination that the privacy protections in place are functioning as designed,” the lawmakers said.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2576203
Speaking on Friday, Clapper said he was looking at the issue before the letter was drafted, and that the letter had been presented to him through the media. “We are looking at this,” Clapper said. “We were before we read about the letter in the media. We read about it before we received it.”
Clapper added that the law was essential to the “nation’s safety and security,” calling it “a prolific producer of critical intelligence for this country and our friends and allies.”
