Senator Ron Wyden

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, seen here in a 2013 meeting with The Oregonian's editorial board, lectured on the state of the U.S. "surveillance state" in downtown Portland on Tuesday.

(Stephanie Yao Long/The Oregonian)

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden scorched senior CIA and NSA officials, the secret doings inside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and a controversial section of the USA Patriot ACT on Tuesday night during a lecture in downtown Portland.

The senior senator from Oregon performed perhaps the most skillful dodge yet – by any politician – of a question nagging many Americans: is former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden a hero, a traitor, or something in between?

Wyden declined to comment about a case now before a criminal court (Snowden faces spy charges). But he said senior intelligence officials should have told the public that the National Security Agency had collected the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans, rather than having them learn about it through Snowden's leaks of classified files to journalists.

"This is a debate that shouldn't have been started this way," said Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who sits in on classified briefings of national security operations.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., lectured on Tuesday in the First Congregational United Church of Christ.

Wyden called for more vigorous oversight of U.S. spy agencies. He called on senior intelligence officials to end what he described variously as their "pattern of deception," "incredibly misleading statements," and "culture of misinformation."

The senator ridiculed Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan for comments he made last week after a "bombshell of a speech" by fellow Senate Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee.

The California senator's 40-minute floor speech on March 11 accused the CIA of interfering with Senate staffers looking into a storehouse of CIA cables on the agency's harsh detention and interrogation of accused terrorists – a program some have called torture. She accused the CIA of wrongly searching staffers' computers.

"Last Tuesday," Wyden said, "the director of the CIA tried to suggest that the search of congressional files never took place at all – even though CIA officials had spent the past few weeks trying to justify it."

The crowd of a few hundred howled.

"In fact," he said, "the CIA's own spokesman has said the CIA conducted this search to find out if the Intelligence Committee had maintained the particular files in question. But in a public interview last weekend, the CIA Director said, and I quote, 'As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing can be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that. That's just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.'"

More laughter rumbled through the packed pews of the First Congregational United Church of Christ.

Wyden noted a few times during his lecture that he placed no blame on the rank-and-file employees of the CIA and NSA, who he described as courageous, dedicated professionals keeping Americans safe in a dangerous world. He laid blame on senior intelligence leaders, who he chastised for their deceptive statements.

The senator offered examples:

"In 2012, the director of the

"A Justice Department official, in another example, testified that (a) provision of the Patriot Act is 'analogous to a grand jury subpoena.' Now, I bet we've got a fair number of lawyers – and budding lawyers – out in the house tonight. So if any of you are aware of a grand jury subpoena that allows for the collection of millions of peoples' phone records on an ongoing daily basis, come on up and tell us."

"I asked the

The answer was "flagrantly inaccurate," so Wyden attempted to get the director to amend his statement, and his office declined to correct the public record. Since then, the director or his representatives have given at least five different explanations to the public for that statement.

"Seems to me," Wyden said, "these are pretty good examples of how embedded the culture of misinformation is becoming."

-- Bryan Denson