Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, says the NSA needs to preserve its wide powers in case of an attack on US homeland

Mass surveillance should be retained because of the prospect of Islamic State attacks within the United States, a key Republican ally of the National Security Agency has claimed.



Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said the NSA needed to preserve its wide powers in case Isis used its bases in Syria and Iraq to unleash atrocities on the US homeland.

“Now you have a very real face on what the threat is,” Rogers told the Guardian on Tuesday. “Somebody calling back from Syria to Minnesota, either recruiting somebody or giving the operational OK to do something. That’s real and it’s serious. Before it seemed all hypothetical. Now you can see it.”

He added: “Think about how many people are in Syria with western passports or even American passports. I want to know if they pick up the phone. If they’re calling back to the States, I don’t know about you, but I want to know who they’re talking to and what they’re talking about.”

Rogers gave the warning as negotiators in the House of Representatives wrangled over a revamp of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that aimed to stop the NSA from its daily collection of US phone records in bulk which failed in the Senate in 2014, and is now returning to Congress.

A coalition of civil libertarian groups on the left and right wants a landmark law to reform the intelligence services in the wake of revelations to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

Part of the Patriot Act known as section 215, which the NSA uses to justify domestic mass surveillance, expires on 1 June. Reformers hope that deadline will give them the leverage to make sure the Freedom Act only reauthorises those provisions on condition of much greater privacy protections.

Republicans, however, are signalling possible resistance. Senator Charles Grassley, the powerful chair of the Senate judiciary committee, whose support is crucial, told reporters on Tuesday he had concerns about “finding a balance between national security and privacy” in the bill.

The National Journal reported that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, may try to thwart reformers by introducing a bill that would reauthorise section 215 until 2020.

Rogers, speaking in a brief interview after addressing the Rand Corporation thinktank in Los Angeles, sought to persuade Democrats and his fellow Republicans of the need to keep extensive surveillance, and expressed hope that “cooler heads” in Congress will renew section 215 without ceding big concessions to reformers.

Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said reauthorising the provision without comprehensive reform would be against the constitution. “Ending the bulk collection of phone records under section 215 is the first step in reforming the NSA. The time for Congress to take that step is now.”

She said NSA defenders would falsely claim that it was necessary to keep the mass surveillance. “But the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the President’s Review Group, and senators who are familiar with how bulk phone records collection works have all said we don’t need the program.”

Kayyali accused reform opponents of peddling fear and discredited claims, such as mass surveillance having stopped 54 terrorist attacks.

“We hope at least Congress has some frank, truthful discussion about NSA spying as we head towards the 1 June deadline.”

In his address to the Rand Corporation audience Rogers, a former FBI agent, painted a dark picture of terrorists and other enemies exploiting the naivety and complacency of certain Americans – including Barack Obama – who did not grasp the urgency of nurturing and projecting US power.

He lamented that the uproar over Snowden’s leaks gave the public a “completely wrong” impression about NSA collection of metadata, which he compared to a postman noting an envelope’s addressee and sender.

“It got so distorted, as if the government was collecting everything and hoarding it in the basement and couldn’t wait to find out about Aunt May’s bunions. The political narrative got ahead of the facts. It was very frustrating.”

Rogers, a close ally of John Boehner, the House majority leader, expressed confidence Congress would strike an acceptable balance.

“I’m hoping cooler heads will prevail knowing what we have now. I mean, Isis is a mess. And this interconnected world we live in, with these folks having the ability to get back to the United States, is really troubling. We better have some mechanism to protect ourselves and still protect our civil rights.”