Feinstein says her committee is waiting on more information before proceeding. Feinstein: No NSA hearing soon

It’ll be awhile yet before the Senate holds another open hearing on NSA surveillance with Intelligence top brass.

On Tuesday the House will hold a rare open intelligence hearing specifically devoted to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs of data-mining phone records and Internet use. But Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said her committee is waiting on more information from the NSA before proceeding on pulling back the blinds on the programs, so far as the intel community will allow.


Feinstein told reporters Monday night that she won’t call an opening briefing until “probably when we get a little further along the facts and know what can be said.” Her ranking member Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) cast further doubt on a quick turnaround, through he said would discuss the issue with Feinstein.

“We so rarely have open hearings,” Chambliss said. “Right now I don’t see it.”

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Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) will convene an open hearing Tuesday devoted to how the NSA programs “protect Americans, and why disclosure aids our adversaries.” Appearing before Rogers’s committee will be NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Robert Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Those same officials have spent much of the past two weeks briefing members of Congress behind closed doors in classified briefings.

Due to a bit of a scheduling quirk, Alexander actually faced an open grilling on the phone and Internet programs from Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s Senate Appropriations Committee instead of the Intelligence Committee. Senators used much of that hearing to question Alexander and Mikulski tried repeatedly to refocus the hearing to the topic of cybersecurity, although she pushed back against a suggestion over Twitter that she wasn’t allowing senators to ask questions about the NSA.

Feinstein said the only new piece of information her committee received over the weekend was notification from the administration that the database of millions of phone numbers was queried 300 times in all of 2012.

“That’s all. That’s not content. That’s querying it, searching it for numbers. That’s a very small number of times,” Feinstein said. “I interpret that as a very small number. I also interpret it as a realistic number: Would you would think, knowing kind of what’s out there.”

This article tagged under: Dianne Feinstein

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