Rogers: NSA ‘lockbox’ stopped dozens of plots

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday he thinks that Americans' concerns about NSA surveillance will change once they fully understand the program, which he says has stopped “dozens” of terrorist attacks.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) refuted what he called “misleading rhetoric,” including reports that the NSA was listening to phone calls, calling the program a “lockbox” with “lots of protections.”

“As people get a better feeling that this is a lockbox with only phone numbers, no names, no addresses in it, we’ve used it sparingly, it is absolutely overseen by the legislature, the judicial branch and the executive branch, has lots of protections built in, if you can see just the number of cases where we’ve actually stopped the plot, I think Americans will come to a different conclusion than all the misleading rhetoric I’ve heard over the last few weeks,” Rogers said on CNN's “State of the Union.”

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Rogers said he's working to declassify more information about the plots that have been stopped, hopefully next week, but officials have to act carefully.

“The reason they’re being careful is we want each of the instance that will be provided, hopefully early this next week, to be accurate as we can and not disclose a source or a method of how disrupted the attack exactly. We don’t want to draw a roadmap for the folks who are trying to kill Americans at home,” Rogers said.

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