Sounding the Alarm, but With a Muted Bell - Senators Wyden and Udall
WASHINGTON — When the Senate was dragooned back to the Capitol in the final days of 2012 to vote on a last-minute deal to avert a sudden tax increase, most senators bristled at the inconvenience. Senator Ron Wyden, an earnest and wonky Democrat from Oregon, instead saw opportunity to again sound his cryptic but insistent warning about the alarming scope of government surveillance.
For hours before a C-SPAN camera and a mostly empty chamber, he expounded about his concerns over the nine-year renewal of a broad Bush-era surveillance law, loading his remarks with references to Ben Franklin, colonialists and obscure semiannual intelligence reports.
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“The intelligence community can target individuals who have no connection to terrorist organizations,” Mr. Udall warned back in May 2011. “They can collect business records on law-abiding Americans.”
Yet shackled by strict rules on the discussion of classified information, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could not — and still cannot — offer much more than an intimation about their concerns. They had to be content to sit in a special sealed room, soak in information that they said appalled and frightened them, then offer veiled messages that were largely ignored.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/politics/senators-wyden-and-udall-warned-about-surveillance.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130607
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