The NSA's Utah Data Center, located 25 miles south of Salt Lake City. AP/Rick Bowmer
Posted on 04/02/2017 7:36:29 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The former director of the US National Security Agency has indicated that surveillance programs have "expanded" under Barack Obama's time in office and said the spy agency has more powers now than when he was in command.
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Hayden's comments came as the debate around the extent of government surveillance in the US and the UK intensified on Sunday. In Washington, some US senators demanded more transparency from the Obama administration. Libertarian Republican Rand Paul said he wanted to mount a supreme court challenge.
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Mark Udall, one of the prominent Senate critics of US government surveillance, called for amendments to the Patriot Act, the controversial law brought in after the 9/11 attacks, to rein in the NSA's powers. "I'm calling for reopening the Patriot Act," Udall said. "The fact that every call I make to my friends or family is noted, the length, the date, that concerns me."
Udall, who has been privy to classified briefings about NSA data collection programs, said it was unclear to him that the surveillance initiatives had disrupted terrorist plots, as the administration claimed.
He called on Obama's administration to make more information about the programs public. "The ultimate check, the ultimate balance is the American public understanding to what extent their calls are being collected, if only in the sense of metadata," he said. "Let's not have this law interpreted secretly, as it has been for the last number of years."
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Hayden, who ran the NSA between 1999 and 2005, where, after September 11, he presided over the creation of secret, warrantless surveillance that collected information on Americans' communication, said the efforts had worked. "We've had two very different presidents pretty much doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance. That seems to me to suggest that these things do work."
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The NSA's Utah Data Center, located 25 miles south of Salt Lake City. AP/Rick Bowmer
Sorry for the huge pic. It’s not that big at the businessinsider.com website.
Democrat Perez winning issues. /s
Well that’s a low bar. To say Obama was even more invasive that Bush.
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