Amash, who has previously butted heads with Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger over access to classified documents, recounted what happened during remarks before libertarian activists attending the Liberty Political Action Conference in Chantilly, Virginia, Thursday night. I quote his anecdote in full here, because it's interesting to hear what it feels like to be one of the activist congressmen trying to rein in National Security Agency surveillance:

What you hear from the intelligence committees, from the chairmen of the intelligence committees, is that members can come to classified briefings and they can ask whatever questions they want. But if you've actually been to one of these classified briefings -- which none of you have, but I have -- what you discover is that it's just a game of 20 questions.

You ask a question and if you don't ask it exactly the right way you don't get the right answer. So if you use the wrong pronoun, or if you talk about one agency but actually another agency is doing it, they won't tell you. They'll just tell you, no that's not happening. They don't correct you and say here's what is happening.

So you actually have to go from meeting to meeting, to hearing to hearing, asking asking questions -- sometimes ridiculous questions -- just to get an answer. So this idea that you can just ask, just come into a classified briefing and ask questions and get answers is ridiculous.

If the government -- in an extreme hypothetical, let's say they had a base on the moon. If I don't know that there's a base on the moon, I'm not going to go into the briefing and say you have a moonbase. Right? [Audience laughs.] If they have a talking bear or something, I'm not going to say, 'You guys, you didn't engineer the talking bear.'

You're not going to ask questions about things you don't know about. The point of the Intelligence Committee is to provide oversight to Congress and every single member of Congress needs information. Each person in Congress represents about 700,000 people. It's not acceptable to say, 'Well, the Intelligence Committees get the information, we don't need to share with the rest of Congress.' The Intelligence Committee is not one of the branches of government, but that's how it's being treated over and over again.

And to show you how silly this whole thing gets, I had a colleague, one of my -- I won't say his name here, but he went to a number of classified briefings. And he asked a question and he never got a satisfactory answer. So he would just revise the question from briefing to briefing. By the time he got to to the third or fourth briefing he asked it in just the right way. He had figured out how to ask it in exactly the right way to get the answer he needed and of course, then they said, "Oh, you caught us. Yeah, we do do that." Then we said, "Can you provide us with some more information?" and they said, "We'll check, we'll see if we can provide you with more information. We'll see if we can provide you with a document" about this thing that he discovered.

And so we left that briefing and we said, "OK, we're going to see something very interesting here."

Then the way we were notified about the availability of this document was through a totally irregular channel.

So they said, OK, we'll make this document available to you but we're not really going to give notice to anyone.

They sent it through the "Dear Colleague" system. This is a system that, it's almost like a spam folder, frankly. Not everyone in Congress is signed up to it. And basically it's a system where you send letters to your colleagues -- will you cosponsor my bill, will you sign my letter, that kind of thing. Normally if you're getting information about an upcoming briefing or an upcoming document that's going to be available to members of Congress, you would get an email. An email, a normal email would come to you, to all members of Congress saying, "Hey there's a document that's going to be available, come stop by." But no, we got it through the "Dear Colleague" system. And the only reasons we noticed is because one of my staffers is silly enough to have this spam folder and look through it and she helped find it and she alerted me, "Hey we've got this document that's going to be available tomorrow, and it's going to be available between 9 a.m. and noon." And it's available between 9 a.m. and noon on the day when members of Congress are leaving to go back to their districts.

So I went back to my colleagues and said, "Hey, did you hear about this briefing with this document?" and they said "No, what are you talking about?" I said there is this notice, we found it, that this document's going to be made available. They said, "We haven't heard of it." I said, 'OK, well come down to the briefing room.' They said "OK, if you say so." We grab a few more people.

The only people who showed up at that briefing were the people I talked to. Nobody else knew that that was going on. Not a single person outside of the people I talked to knew that was going on. And we had to sign a disclosure ... an anti-disclosure agreement saying we wouldn't talk to any of our colleagues about what we saw.

So we can go to this briefing, we can see this document -- which I can't tell you about -- and we have to sign a document saying, we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying, we're not going to talk to any of our colleagues about what we see here. And that's it. You've got that three-hour window, done. After that, you're not going to hear about it again.

And so you can see why the intelligence community when they ridiculously send out a press release -- today* -- saying, "Oh we provided these briefings to members, if they didn't come by they're just too lazy. If they didn't know about these programs it's because they're just not competent." That's basically the gist of what they're saying when they send out these press releases. It's totally ridiculous, and it's outrageous.