The FISA court also repeatedly rebuked the N.S.A. for its collection of Internet metadata. In one opinion, the court said that for years the “N.S.A. exceeded the scope of authorized acquisition continuously.” It also declared that the N.S.A.’s description of the program had been “untrue,” and that the government had engaged in “unauthorized” and “systemic overcollection,” had searched the system using terms that were “non-compliant with the required RAS approval process,” and had improperly disseminated intelligence about Americans derived from the database. In fact, the court said, almost every record “generated by this program included some data that had not been authorized for collection.” The court also noted that the N.S.A. program had conducted “unauthorized ‘electronic surveillance’ ” and had asked a FISA judge to “authorize the government to engage in conduct that Congress has unambiguously prohibited.”

Wyden, who had read the court opinions and knew the troubled history of the Internet-data program, pressed his advantage. Throughout the year, in correspondence that remains secret, he repeatedly challenged the N.S.A.’s contention that the program was effective. In late 2011, with little explanation, and despite the fact that, just months earlier, the N.S.A. had sworn in court and to Congress that the program was essential, the N.S.A. sent Wyden and other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee a notification that it was indefinitely suspending the program.

On the face of it, the Congress of 2011-12 had been a success for Wyden. He had new allies on the left and the right. He had shut down a program that was collecting huge amounts of Internet data about Americans. During Olsen’s confirmation hearing as the director of the N.C.T.C., Wyden forced Olsen to admit publicly that the FISA court made interpretations of law in secret. In July, 2012, Wyden successfully lobbied for the director of National Intelligence to publicly acknowledge that, “on at least one occasion . . . some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702” law was “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

Yet three of the four original Bush programs—the phone-metadata program and the content-collection programs—were still running, and, through Olsen’s years of work, the N.S.A. seemed finally to be governing them all within the confines of the court’s rules. The Patriot Act had been renewed, and, in 2012, the FISA amendments, which codified the content-collection program in law, were also reauthorized. In March, 2013, Wyden had his dramatic encounter with Clapper, but, at the time, the public didn’t know that Clapper hadn’t told the truth. Despite Wyden’s victories, any momentum for intelligence reform seemed dead.

But there was one person who was troubled by Clapper’s testimony. “Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy,” Edward Snowden said later, in a Q. & A. on the Guardian Web site. At some point during this period, Snowden also came upon the N.S.A. inspector general’s secret report about the history of the President’s Surveillance Program and STELLARWIND. It was rich with details: the secret computer servers that were delivered under police escort, Hayden’s dealings with Cheney’s staff, the facts about the Justice Department’s rebellion, the decision to take the legally dubious programs and fit them under the umbrella of the Patriot Act. Snowden later told the Times that, after he read the report, he decided that he would release it—and thousands of other documents—to the press. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all,” he told the paper, “secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”

On October 26th, a warm and clear Saturday in Washington, a few hundred protesters gathered in front of Union Station for what organizers called the Stop Watching Us Rally Against Mass Surveillance. A man wearing a giant papier-mâché Obama mask roamed the plaza in a trenchcoat and sunglasses holding an oversized “Obama-Cam.” There were signs about “NSA Doublespeak” and demands that the government “stop sniffing my packets,” a tech reference to intercepting data as it moves across the Internet. Two protesters held up a large flag depicting the artist Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama drawing with the words “Yes We Scan,” a play on the President’s campaign slogan. Wyden couldn’t attend, but he posted a short video message on YouTube, saying, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand up and protect the privacy of millions of law-abiding Americans. Please know that it’s the voices of people like you that are going to make a difference in the fight for real, meaningful surveillance reform.”

It was Wyden’s kind of crowd: geeky, libertarian, passionate, and baffled that the rest of the public wasn’t as outraged as they were. He insisted to me afterward that a movement for reform was building. Snowden’s disclosures had vindicated him, he said, and he predicted that they would change the way the N.S.A. operated: “I hope that they see now that the truth always comes out in America, that the deceptions and misleading statements that they engaged in for years are just not going to pass as gospel in the future.”

Such a movement is less evident in Congress. A couple of days after the rally, on October 29th, the Senate Intelligence Committee retreated to its secret chambers, on the second floor of the Hart Office Building. The room has vaulted doors and steel walls that keep it safe from electronic monitoring; the electricity supply to the room is reportedly filtered, for the same reason. The committee’s fifteen members, eight Democrats and seven Republicans, debated Feinstein’s intelligence-reform bill, the fiSA Improvements Act, for three hours. As Congress and the public have digested the details of Snowden’s disclosures, the legislative debate has narrowed to three big questions: Should Congress reform the e-mail and phone tapping allowed by Section 702 to insure that the communications of innocent Americans are not getting swept up in the N.S.A.’s targeting of terrorists? Should the N.S.A. end the bulk collection of phone metadata now authorized by Section 215? Should the FISA court be reformed to make it less deferential to the government?

The committee’s answer to all three questions was no. By a vote of 11–4, it endorsed the Feinstein bill. Wyden, Udall, and Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico elected last year and the newest member of Wyden’s Franklin caucus, voted against the bill. (Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, also voted no, because he thought the bill was too restrictive.) “There’s three of us out of eight on our side,” Wyden told me later. “That’s a lot better than meeting in a phone booth.” But the majority of the committee declared, in a report, that the compliance issues at the N.S.A. were “uniformly unintentional, self-identified, and reported to the Court and to Congress.” The majority added, “Up until these programs were leaked, their implementation by N.S.A. was an example of how our democratic system of checks and balances is intended to, and does, work.”

The following day, Wyden said of the Feinstein bill, “They’re wrapping the status quo in this really sparkly gift-wrapping paper and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, this is beautiful.’ They’re going to look inside and see the changes are skin-deep, there’s not really much there.” He added, “People get on this committee and the first thing the intelligence community tries to do is get them to be ambassadors for the intelligence community rather than people doing vigorous oversight. The intelligence community basically takes everybody aside and says, ‘Here’s the way it works. . . .’ There’s no discussion about privacy issues or questions about civil liberties—those usually get thrown in afterward.”

“He loved the outdoors.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Feinstein took strong exception to Wyden’s characterization: “I’ve been on the committee for twelve years now, and, when I went on, I knew I had a lot to learn. I asked a lot of questions, I read a lot of material, I went out to the N.S.A. You learn what questions to ask, you write letters asking questions, you raise the questions in a meeting. I don’t think there’s anything that Senator Wyden has asked me to do that I haven’t done. If he’s got a better way, he’s got substantial seniority on the committee, he ought to suggest it.”