Obama faces critics of NSA program

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Struggling to salvage a massive surveillance program, President Barack Obama faced congressional critics of the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ telephone records Thursday as snowballing concerns made new limitations on the intelligence effort appear increasingly likely.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden joined lawmakers on both sides of the issue for an Oval Office meeting designed to stem the bleeding of public support and show Obama was serious about engaging. Among the participants were the NSA’s most vigorous congressional supporters — the top Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate intelligence panels — alongside its most stern critics, including Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado.

The lawmakers departed the rainy White House grounds without speaking to reporters. But in interviews later, they said there was a consensus that the surveillance efforts are suffering from perception problems that have undercut trust among the American people.

“There is openness to making changes,” said Rep. C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence panel and a strong NSA defender, said Obama and the lawmakers didn’t agree to take specific steps but brought up a number of proposals that will be fleshed out over the August congressional recess.

“A lot of ideas were thrown out,” Chambliss told The Associated Press. “Nothing was concluded.”

Wyden, in an interview, said he and Udall had sought to convince Obama of the urgency of addressing rising concerns. He said he proposed strengthening the government’s ability to get emergency authorization to collect an individual’s phone records, so that pre-emptive collection of everyone’s records would no longer be necessary.

“I felt that the president was open to ideas — and we’re going to make sure he has some,” Wyden said after returning to Capitol Hill.

Wyden and two Senate colleagues also unveiled legislation Thursday to overhaul the secret federal court that oversees the programs, which critics decry as largely a rubber stamp. The senators aim to make the court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, more adversarial by creating a special advocate who could argue for privacy during closed-door proceedings and appeal decisions. A companion bill would diversify the court’s bench by ending the chief justice’s sole authority to pick its judges.

Meanwhile, the head of the NSA openly clashed with lawmakers including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., over the agency’s statements that telephone and email data collection helped foil 54 terror plots.

Rising tensions have stoked concern at the White House that surveillance programs Obama considers crucial will soon be undermined or even dismantled — despite the fact that many Democrats and Republicans in Congress have come to the NSA’s defense.

Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has threatened to seek to end the phone-records program if it’s not proved effective. And Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., signaled Thursday that unless an agreement is reached on releasing more of the secret court’s opinions, he would push Congress to use its “power of the purse” to compel their disclosure by withholding funding for certain programs.