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The NSA Is Likely Spying on US Congress Members

If regular citizens and foreign lawmakers are on the spy list, why not Congress members?

Jan 7, 2014 08:31 GMT  ·  By
NSA gives a nonanswer to question about spying on US lawmakers
   NSA gives a nonanswer to question about spying on US lawmakers

The National Security Agency was asked by a Senator if any members of the Congress were under surveillance at any time. The intelligence agency predictably sidestepped the question saying that the members of the Congress were just like everyone else.

What does this mean? Well, it’s quite likely that the answer to the question asked by Bernie Sanders is positive, since, after all, data so far has indicated that American citizens have been spied upon by the NSA.

Sanders’ letter defined spying as “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business,” CNN reports.

The response was redacted quite carefully. “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons,” the letter reads.

Despite the NSA message, however, it has been revealed on countless occasions that the agency has in fact collected data from Americans, even if this was prohibited. Every time they discussed the issue, intelligence leaders referred to these particular records as “inadvertently” collected, meaning they were gathered by accident.

James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, admitted to lying to the Congress when asked whether the NSA collected data on U.S. citizens. To cut things short – US Congress members are most likely on NSA’s list.

They aren’t the only ones, of course. Politicians from all over the world have been on the NSA’s watch list for years and for this, we only need to refer to the scandals in the past months involving Angela Merkel or Dilma Rousseff.

We shouldn’t be surprised if the US lawmakers react more harshly to the fact that the NSA is spying on them than on the citizens they’re supposed to represent, since, after all, foreign politicians had the very same reaction.