I'm saying I don't trust you. 

 

You lied to Congress. Why would we believe you're not lying to us right now? 

 

He said he hasn't lied to Congress. Meantime, as the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a batch of classified documents on its Domestic Intelligence Gathering Operations, material that was not scheduled for declassification until the year 2038. It included a 2011 Justice Department briefing paper describing two now familiar NSA programs for logging phone and e-mail data. 

 

It says, quote "Only a tiny fraction of such records are ever viewed by NSA intelligence analysts," but the new information from Edward Snowden shows accessing such information is available to a very wide range of NSA analysts and is simple and is easy to get. Detailed extensively in Britain's "Guardian" newspaper, the program is called Xkeyscore, an NSA analyst requiring no prior authorization from any court for using it to conduct searches on Americans. 

 

They only have to fill in a box stating there is some kind of foreign connection. In addition, the article details how XKeyscore searches not just e-mail subject lines and addresses but also the body of the message itself. Also social media activity and Web browsing history. Now the NSA maintains that access to XKeyscore and other search tools is limited. 

 

Count Michigan Republican Congressman Justin Amash is a skeptic. He tried and nearly succeeded last week in passing legislation to rein in the NSA and is now backing a bipartisan effort to try again. 

 

Congressman, this program revealed in "The Guardian" today, XKeyscore, how concerned should people be about it? 

 

Very concerned. We're going to have a classified briefings tomorrow with Keith Alexander and I intend to ask some questions. One of the things that we don't know is where is the content coming from. There is a whole array of content coming in, whether it be e-mails or other Internet information and I'd like to know and my colleagues would like to know where this data is coming from. 

 

Did you know about this beforehand? Because, you know, what the people in the intelligence community always say is well, look, there is congressional oversight but my understanding is, there's only congressional oversight about what the NSA happens to tell you about. 

 

Yeah, we have these briefings and is it possible that in some document somewhere when they hand you 200 pages and tell you, you can only look at it in a room, that there's some line about this program? It's possible. I don't know. 

 

The problem we have when we go to these briefings is that we have to ask exactly the right question to get the right answer. If we don't ask the precise question, we don't get an answer. 

 

We've had a number of intelligence officials over the last couple of months or weeks certainly saying, well, you know, these, some of these programs, these collecting of metadata, collecting of phone calls or phone numbers, it's stopped dozens of terrorist attacks. 

 

Now Senator Patrick Leahy, he came forward and said well, look, maybe it stopped or was involved in one, but when you actually start to look at the details of how these programs were used it has not stopped nearly the number that some intelligence officials have been claiming. 

 

Yeahs, and they've been, there are many of them who have been very careful to say under this program and other programs we have stopped 54 terrorist attacks. There are some members of Congress who have not been very careful and I think have bordered on giving false testimony to the American people. 

 

And we should take a close look at that, but yeah, they, I think those who are careful and cautious about what they say realize that it's not this particular collection of phone records, mass collection of phone records, that is doing the work here. 

 

I spoke to Glenn Greenwald on this program last night. He pointed out that people within the government, you know, high-level officials, leak classified information all the time if it suits their political interest or, you know, whatever interest they may have and nothing seems to happen to them and yet, people with no status, no political connections like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or even lower-level officials, they leak classified information and get hit with the full blunt of the U.S. justice system particularly under the Obama administration. 

 

I'm certainly not condoning the breaking of any law, but is the system unfair here? 

 

I think the system is unfair. And we need a better way for those who want to blow the whistle on the government to do so. There is a lot of talk that Edward Snowden could go to, for example, a member of Congress and tell them about the program, that it wasn't being applied in what he thought was a constitutional manner. 

 

And that's just not true. Edward Snowden could have come to me or most members of Congress and talk about it. He had to go to his superiors and he might be able to talk to some people on the intelligence committee. So they don't have a lot of avenues, and if you look at some of the intelligence committee members, it's pretty stacked(预先做好手脚) in favor of people who support these programs with the exception of a few people like Senator Wyden and Senator Udall and some others.