Three members of the House Judiciary Committee asked...
Three members of the House Judiciary Committee asked Deputy Attorney General James Cole for clarification on his remarks before the committee at a hearing last week. “You indicated that the Administration would look only at call records from a Member…
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of Congress if it had a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the number was related to terrorism,” wrote Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., in a letter to Cole Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1fhi6lx). “That is not accurate. The NSA looks at individual numbers when it has low level, particularized suspicion, but it looks at millions more with no suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever, some of whom may well be Members of Congress.” The members said the government looks at a wide network based off of contacts of contacts and suggested a wide swath of records that could be collected. Such surveillance may raise separation-of-powers concerns, with the executive branch collecting information on the legislative, they said. Cole must clarify his testimony and “fully disclose all of the ways in which the government conducts or may possibly conduct surveillance on Members of Congress,” they said.