Lawmakers are looking at relevant legislation. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Growing concern over NSA

Concern in Congress is mounting over broad surveillance by the Obama administration as new revelations surfaced that the National Security Administration is monitoring Internet usage.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee is shopping bills that would address some portions of the government monitoring, an aide said, particularly the NSA collection of Verizon phone records. His legislation would likely be similar to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments that he pushed last year with fellow senators like Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).


The measures, both of which failed last December, would require the declassification of certain FISA court opinions and require reports on the impact of FISA surveillance on Americans. The Lee aide said that with government surveillance so prominent in the news, the legislation may find itself some new supporters.

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Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he’s likely to support that legislation.

“We should have done this,” Durbin said of increasing oversight and transparency on government surveillance. “We may not have run into this surprise breaking story these past few days if we did.”

Durbin voted against FISA reauthorization and has worked on transparency issues with Lee. In the past, he said, amendments to broaden oversight were “clearly an idea that didn’t sell.”

In the wake of the initial revelations about Verizon records, the general reaction on Capitol Hill was muted. Members of the intelligence committees said they knew about the surveillance and weren’t alarmed, and that they had been routinely consulted. Civil libertarians such as Lee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for strengthening privacy protections.

( WATCH: Feinstein, Chambliss defend NSA)

After staying largely quiet this week, Wyden and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) issued a joint statement on Friday afternoon blasting the administration’s use of the Patriot Act. The two have hinted for years that Americans would be shocked at how some of its provisions are used.

“We respectfully but firmly disagree with the way that this program has been described by senior administration officials. After years of review, we believe statements that this very broad Patriot Act collection has been ‘a critical tool in protecting the nation’ do not appear to hold up under close scrutiny,” the two Intelligence Committee members said.

“We also disagree with the statement that the broad Patriot Act collection strikes the ‘right balance’ between protecting American security and protecting Americans’ privacy. In our view it does not,” they added.

Amid the new reports, there are new calls for at least further debate about how FISA and the Patriot Act are being implemented.

( WATCH: Holder, senators tiptoe around NSA)

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) lamented that lawmakers were too consumed by the fiscal cliff last December when FISA came up for renewal. Leahy and Lee both voted against the FISA extension, and Leahy offered a substitute that failed.

“I wish they had paid attention to what I tried to put in legislation,” Leahy said Friday.

But some senators held the line on Friday, when the Obama administration continued to defend the surveillance practices as necessary to defend the nation.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), though emphasizing the necessary balance between privacy and security, said that Internet monitoring had helped thwart terrorist plots, as congressional intelligence leaders said Thursday of the phone monitoring practice.

( WATCH: Obama: ‘Nobody is listening to your telephone calls’)

“What they were doing is trying to save lives. I know for a fact lives were saved in both these programs. The issue is finding the balance between protecting people and our freedoms and that’s what I’m always after,” Boxer said, adding again: “I know they’ve saved lives.”

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The NSA program that culls millions of emails and communications from major tech firms helped thwart a plot to bomb the New York City subway in 2009, according to a report from Reuters on Friday afternoon.

Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) called the new Internet revelations “very concerning.” In tandem with the seizure of Verizon phone records by the NSA, he said he worries that government’s reach is more comprehensive than previously thought, saying he’d be “less concerned if it was one thing.” Boozman voted for FISA’s extension.

“I haven’t had any problems in the past with listening in, if we have a known terrorist overseas contacting somebody here or vice versa, someone here contacting a known terrorist overseas,” Boozman said. “But it sounds like this thing is expanding dramatically.”

He said the administration’s interpretation of security legislation has been “greatly expanded” beyond what Congress thought it was okay-ing and that the government is monitoring citizens in “places where it hasn’t been done before.”

Lee also suggested that Americans simply weren’t aware of what sort of authorities Congress was delegating to the administration’s intelligence arms.

“Congress is very, very bad at overhauling and creating massive bureaucratic systems at once,” Lee said on the floor of the Senate on Friday. “Did the American people have any idea that the Patriot Act would empower the National Security Agency to spy on all Americans through their cellphones and computers?”

But one of the Senate’s two independent members, Angus King of Maine, warned of the dangers of tying the Internet and phone issues together. King is also an Intelligence committee member.

“Let’s not conflate these two issues. One is the phone records issue which is all Americans, the other is the Internet issue which is particularly focused on foreigners,” King said on Morning Joe on Friday morning.

Jose DelReal and Adam Snider contributed to this report.

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