Surveillance Program Backers Resisted Basic Oversight

Here’s something important to remember about yesterday’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been hovering up data on every call made by every Verizon customer in the country: It’s not just that there isn’t enough oversight of federal surveillance operations. It’s that the congressional legislators behind the program haven actively resisted even modest attempts at oversight. And they’ve done so under the pretense that those modest efforts would undermine national security.  Whenthe FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012, which broadly governs federal electronic surveillance activities, was up for a vote in the Senate at the tail end of last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced two amendments that would have added a layer of oversight to certain federal surveillance activities.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/06/surveillance-program-backers-resisted-ba