Sens. Mark Udall and Ron Wyden both tried to raise objections to the program without spilling secrets, writing in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows." Udall told The Denver Post on Thursday that he "did everything short of leaking classified information" to bring attention to the NSA's phone metadata collection. At a hearing of the Senate Appropriations committee on Thursday, Sen. Mark Kirk was one of several Senators to ask Attorney General Eric Holder, vaguely, about the phone-call mining. "With all due respect, I don't think this is an appropriate setting to discuss that issue," Holder answered. The nation's top lawyer appeared to be reminding a leading member of Congress that public Congressional hearings are not where members of Congress are allowed to talk about the NSA's spying program.

Jennifer Hoelzer, a former aide to Wyden, explained how hard it is to raise concerns about a program you can't acknowledge the existence of. Writing in the Huffington Post, she says, "Seriously, do you have any idea how frustrating it is to have your boss ask you to get reporters to write about something he can't tell you about?" Hoelzer explains, "Because, while he may be a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the executive branch retains the sole authority to classify and declassify information." The executive branch can use this to its advantage:

It's why, for example, President Bush was able to point to a handful of details supporting his case that torture works, without worrying that someone might be able to declassify (or even acknowledge the existence of) reams of evidence that didn't support his case.

"I think there's a suggestion that somehow any classified program is a quote-unquote 'secret' program which means it's somehow suspicious," Obama said on Friday. The president said his position was not "trust me, we're doing the right thing, we know who the bad guys are" but that there are enough checks in place. "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution and due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." We're not going to have many easy answers from each branch either.

Here's the impromptu question-and-answer session of the president's briefing on Obamacare, in full:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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