NSA Says Checking to See if They Spied on Bernie Sanders Is Illegal

By Ken Hanly, Digital Journal

16 January 14

n response to a letter from Senator Bernie Sanders asking if NSA spied on members of the U.S. Congress in the past, NSA chief, General Alexander claimed that the NSA does nothing unlawful but refuses to answer questions about any past abuses.

This further non-answer follows on an earlier response as to whether the NSA spied on members of Congress. As well as claiming that NSA did nothing unlawful they said that members of Congress had the same privacy rights as other Americans. This did not of course answer the question, the whole idea of the response no doubt.

The NSA does not deny that it collects a vast amount of phone meta-data but this is not considered by the NSA as spying on individuals since they do not look at the content of the communications. However, the meta-data can be used to identify individuals and can provide a considerable amount of information about them. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein calls the meta data collection prudence not prying. Sanders considers this surveillance spying.

General Alexander's argument by which he concludes that even to check whether in the past Sanders was spied on in the sense of collecting meta-data from his phone calls would be illegal is the sort of thing that one might expect to come from the satirical site Onion. Any attempt to see if such meta-data were collected for any members of Congress violates the privacy rights of members of Congress:

""Among those protections is the condition that NSA can query the metadata only based on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign terrorist groups, For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress..""

The entire letter from the NSA can be read here.

Sanders was not impressed by Alexander's response and said:

""In my view, the information collected by the NSA has the potential to give an unscrupulous administration enormous power over elected officials,""

This Friday, January 17, Obama is scheduled to outline a list of reforms to the agency based upon recommendations from a review group he set up.

Some predict that there will be little change. However, a "public advocate" may be added to the FISA court. As the appended video shows Sanders has introduced legislation that would limit what NSA could collect and keep. Don't expect it to pass or even get much publicity. Sanders' bill can be found here.