New spying documents released as Senators push for transparency

The Obama administration declassified several documents on Wednesday tied to its telephone spying program in an effort to tamp down congressional opposition to domestic surveillance.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released three declassified documents related to the surveillance programs revealed by former security contractor Edward Snowden. In a statement, Clapper said the declassification was made in the "interest of increased transparency."

Th declassified documents, not previously leaked by Snowden, include the 2009 and 2011 reports on the National Security Agency's "Bulk Collection Program" under the Patriot Act. In addition, it released an April 2013 order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court describing how the data should be stored and accessed.

The documents will provide little solace, however, to Americans hoping to understand the legal analysis that underpinned the widespread surveillance, as they show only in broad strokes how NSA officials use the data.

The release of the classified documents comes as the UK's Guardian newspaper provided new insight Wednesday into how the NSA scours the world's data.

Dozens of slides published by the paper divulge details about XKeyscore, an NSA program that, according to Snowden, gives the U.S. the ability to spy on "the vast majority of human communications" and covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” 

The program allows analysts to search massive databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of people, without prior authorization, according to the paper.

Some of the slides carry screenshots appearing to show what analysts would see as they trawled the intercepted conversations. The slides also indicate that XKeyscore is supported by 700 servers and 150 sites across the globe.

Congress, meanwhile, continued to debate the U.S. spying program Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that convened high-ranking intelligence officials to testify about the programs’ merits and procedures.

"We need straightforward answers, and I'm concerned we're not getting them," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and chairman of the committee, admonishing Clapper for misleading testimony he gave earlier this year.

"Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official," said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "Especially on a matter of such importance."

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., raised concerns about the wide-ranging scope of the program, particularly through “hop analysis.” If he was the subject of a NSA query, Durbin said, and he had 40 phone contacts on his cell phone, a total of 2 million phone records could be combed through by the agency.

“What has been described as a discrete program for people who would cause us harm, when you look at the reach of the program, it involves a great number of Americans,” Durbin said.

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also expressed reservations about the executive branch’s control of the declassification of information when it served to bolster its own case. He plans to introduce legislation Thursday that will force the federal government to inform American citizens when they are the subject of a query and when their phone records have been mined.

“I don’t want a situation where the government is transparent only when it’s convenient for the government,” Franken said.   

NSA Deputy Director John Inglis, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce defended the surveillance programs but said they were open to changing their procedures to address privacy concerns.

Pressed on exactly how many terrorist plots had been foiled because of the bulk records collection, Inglis could only point to one definitively.  

“That’s a very difficult question to answer, in that that’s not necessarily how these programs work,” he said.

The intelligence officials also emphasized that there were safeguards already in place, including judicial review of the bulk collection program by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court every 90 days and the requirement that NSA analysts have a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” about a particular number before they can comb through the metadata.

“We don’t get to roam around it and look around to our heart’s content,” Cole said. “The only way you can access it is if you have reasonable articulable suspicion that the number you are going to query off of is related to a terrorist group.”

Inglis said no one had been fired and no one had offered to resign over former security contractor Edward Snowden's ability to take large amounts of classified data from agency computers.

Inglis said, "No," when asked at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if anyone had been fired over the sweeping NSA surveillance programs exposed by Snowden.

"Everyone is working hard to understand what happened," Inglis said.  

With Al Jazeera and wire services