Senator Slams Domestic Spying: ‘Secret Law Has No Place In America’

By Hayes Brown

WASHINGTON, DC — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) warned an audience at the Center for American Progress on Tuesday of the threat that the post-9/11 surveillance state could not only become permanent, but extend far beyond even its current reach.

Wyden was one of only ten senators to vote against the re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act in 2006. And in March of last year, he and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) said Americans would be “stunned” to learn how the Executive Branch was interpreting certain provisions of the law to expand its surveillance power using programs such as the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of metadata from cell phone and internet companies recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden...Wyden claimed — as he did during the debate over drones earlier this year — that there’s a large gap between what the American people believe a law to be and how the Executive Branch interprets it. When it comes to the siphoning up of data from American citizens, “the public was actually misled,” Wyden said, in statements from top intelligence officials including NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

That secret interpretation of the law is upheld, Wyden said, through the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, which saw its powers expanded greatly after 9/11. While originally meant to rule on wiretap petitions against possible foreign agents under FISA, the Court has now become the source of broad rulings backing the gathering of information from broad swaths of Americans indefinitely. “There is no other court in America that has strayed so far from the adversarial process,” Wyden said, pointing out that since its rulings are secret, they’re almost impossible to appeal.

Not all programs revealed in the recent leaks found themselves under fire from the senator. When it comes to the NSA’s filtering through internet communications, including the use of the PRISM program, Wyden noted that the agency’s collection had created “information with real value.” Congress should add further privacy protections to Sec. 702 of the PATRIOT act, which authorizes the program, Wyden said, noting that “one program is doing all the work, while the other is along for the ride.”

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http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/23/2342801/wyden-nsa-cap/