As intelligence officials came under fire over controversial National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, two senators announced that they would introduce legislation aimed at reforming the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and—in an apparent response to a recent petition from technology firms and civil liberties groups—providing more public information about government surveillance.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) said he would introduce a bill this week requiring the government to report on the number of Americans swept into its databases and allowing Internet companies to disclose more information about the requests they receive from intelligence agencies. While several prominent firms have begun issuing “transparency reports” detailing the law enforcement requests for user information, intelligence orders typically come with gag orders forbidding the recipients from revealing even the existence of the request. The firms—joined by civil liberties groups—have lobbied hard for permission to reveal more about how, and how often, they respond to government demands for user data.

Franken also criticized the government’s “ad hoc transparency” about its programs, arguing that selective disclosure of information in response to leaks “doesn’t engender trust.” He pointed to the government’s decision to release, just minutes before the hearing began, several documents related to the NSA’s massive phone log database, which collects the “call detail records” of nearly all Americans under the Patriot Act’s Section 215 “business records” authority. “Did you start thinking about this, like, yesterday?” Franken asked sarcastically, suggesting that the new disclosures were driven more by political convenience than any change in the risk to national security posed by the documents.

His remarks were echoed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). “There was no organized plan for how we rationally declassify this so the American people can participate in the debate,” Whitehouse said. “You’re still trying to get your boots on because you never took steps to get news out about this program that could have avoided this [controversy].”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) announced legislation of his own, which would alter both the operation of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the method by which its judges are selected. Adopting a proposal advocated by former FISC Judge James G. Carr, who testified at the hearing, Blumenthal’s bill would allow for an “adversary” to appear before the court to counter government arguments in favor of novel surveillance methods or broader interpretations of intelligence law—an opposing voice normally wholly absent from closed proceedings in which only the government is allowed to present its case. (Another witness, former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker, questioned whether a lawyer representing some “abstract concept of civil liberties” rather than a flesh-and-blood client would meaningfully improve the deliberative process.) Blumenthal will also offer a different method of appointing judges to the court. Currently, FISC members are unilaterally selected by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, a process that critics charge has produced a bench stacked heavily with conservative Republicans and former prosecutors predisposed to defer to the government.

The hearing also saw the committee’s influential chair, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), call into question the oft-repeated claims that the NSA’s recently disclosed programs—a massive database of domestic phone records collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the PRISM system for monitoring Internet communications—had helped prevent 54 “terrorist events” around the world. Leahy said that the classified information he had reviewed “does not reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots that Section 215 helped thwart or prevent, let alone 54 as some have suggested." A speech by Sen. Ron Wyden last week had expressed similar skepticism, suggesting that the call records program was misleadingly lumped together with the more valuable PRISM program, allowing officials to claim that “the programs” had been useful, even though “one program is doing all the work while the other is along for the ride.”

Pressed to say how often the Section 215 program had been critical in preventing a plot that would have otherwise gone undetected—rather than merely making a “contribution”—NSA Deputy Director John Inglis alluded to just one case that he said “comes close” to satisfying that “but-for” criterion. FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce countered that while the call records database rarely provides the initial lead that helps identify a terror plot, it “plays a crucial role in closing gaps and seams” during later phases of investigation—comparing it to baseball players who “hit singles every day” even if they seldom knock one out of the park.

Leahy also expressed incredulity when the NSA’s Inglis acknowledged that the Agency had not yet determined how former contractor Edward Snowden had circumvented security measures meant to prevent sensitive documents from being exfiltrated. The first stories based on Snowden’s leaks of classified information appeared in The Guardian nearly two months ago. The admission that the NSA is still struggling to understand that breach raises the possibility that whatever vulnerabilities Snowden exploited may remain in place—whether for potential leakers or insiders with less public-spirited designs.

Listing image by Senate Judiciary Committee