14 DAY TRIAL // The US Department of Justice has finally admitted that the idea that the NSA is intercepting communications of Congress members isn’t that crazy after all.
As James Cole, deputy attorney general of the US Department of Justice, was testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee which is looking at reform options for the NSA surveillance policies, he admitted that the agency probably did collect data on members of the US Congress.
“We probably do, Mr. Congressman. But we’re not allowed to look at any of those, however, unless we have reasonable suspicion that those numbers are related to a known terrorist threat,” Cole replied to a question coming from Representative Darrell Issa, who asked him whether the agency collected data from number codes pertaining to Congressional offices.
This doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, considering that the NSA collects data on millions of Americans, even more foreigners and even state leaders from Europe, South America and beyond.
Previously, a senator called Bernie Sanders, sent the NSA a letter asking whether legislators were being spied upon to which the agency gave a rather ambiguous answer.
“NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such privacy protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons,” the agency replied to that particular inquiry.
The answer suggests that the NSA actually cares about individual’s privacy, when in fact, as reports based on Snowden’s leaked files show, that’s not exactly the situation.
The fact that the NSA collects data, but supposedly doesn’t go through it, shouldn’t really make anyone feel safer in any way since the privacy violation is the fact that the information is collected in the first place.
Perhaps if the Congress believes that the NSA is spying on them, some actual reforms will be implemented.