Oregon senator and vocal critic of NSA says senior intelligence officials will try to make sure any change is merely 'skin deep'

The Democratic senator leading congressional efforts to rein in the National Security Agency warned on Wednesday that senior intelligence and administration officials will attempt to block any meaningful change while publicly speaking the language of reform.

Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told a conference on the NSA and privacy at the Cato Institute in Washington that the reform campaign was at a pivotal moment, with the Senate and the House of Representatives to examine new surveillance legislation over the next few weeks.

But, Wyden said, the American public should not be fooled by what he called the “business-as-usual brigade” – made up of intelligence officials, their supporters in Congress, thinktanks and the media.

They will “try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting”, Wyden said. “Their endgame is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin deep.”

The Oregon senator is a part of a bipartisan Senate group who unveiled the first comprehensive surveillance reform bill two weeks ago. It would end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, first revealed by the Guardian in June, change the secret court that oversees the agency’s foreign intelligence programs and close the loophole that allows analysts to review Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Wyden said he expected a tough legislative battle against the “defenders of the status quo”, whose arguments, he said, had an “Alice in Wonderland flavour” that left the public with a distorted view of the NSA’s activities and the effectiveness of oversight.

"Privacy protections that don’t actually protect privacy are not worth the paper they're printed on,” he said. “And just because intelligence officials say that a particular program helps catch terrorists doesn’t make it true.”

He was also sceptical about the Obama administration’s professed commitment to greater transparency. “When it comes to greater transparency and openness, the executive branch has shown little interest in lasting reforms that would actually make the intelligence community more open and transparent, and executive branch officials will probably resist any attempts to mandate greater transparency,” he said.

Wyden was scathing about the government’s “trust us” argument on surveillance, which he said was undermined by the NSA’s own track record. “The rules have been broken, and the rules have been broken a lot,” he said.

As a result, Wyden said, it would be a mistake for Congress to enshrine these measures in law. As well as giving the domestic surveillance programs a stamp of approval, it would also pave the way for other types of private data – such as medical and firearms records – to be collected in bulk. “Codifying the bulk collection program into law and ushering in a new era of digital surveillance would normalize over-broad authorities that were once unthinkable in America,” he said.

The NSA’s programs were also undermining public trust in the major US technology companies that have been subject to surveillance orders, Wyden said. “If they start to lose ground to foreign competition it will put tens of thousands of high-paying jobs at serious risk. If a foreign enemy were doing this much damage to our economy, people would be out in the street with pitchforks.”

Another speaker at the Cato event, Michigan congressman Justin Amash, said the director of national intelligence James Clapper should face criminal charges for lying to Congress.

"Director Clapper very clearly lied to Congress," said Amash following his speech. "He should be prosecuted for lying."

Amash continued: “We can't have those kinds of actions in Congress and find them acceptable."

Clapper has come under heavy criticism for a March statement to the Senate intelligence committee that the NSA does "not wittingly" collect information on millions of Americans – a claim directly contradicted by whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about mass phone records collection by the NSA.

Railing against what he considered undue deference to the Obama administration and intelligence agencies, Amash lambasted his colleagues on the secret intelligence committees as "enemies of Congress".

"Time and again, the intelligence committees have not been the friends of Congress – they have been the enemies of Congress," Amash said, accusing the committee members of "covering up for the administration".

His fellow Michigan Republican, Mike Rogers – who has strongly defended the NSA's bulk surveillance and opposed Amash's July effort to defund it – chairs the House intelligence committee.

Amash described secretive closed-door briefings for legislators on secret surveillance programs as providing "no real information" to the members of Congress that have to vote on surveillance laws.

"There's no real information provided," Amash said. "You don't know what questions to ask. You have to just start spitting out random questions. Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army?"

• Spencer Ackerman, the Guardian's US national security editor, was a speaker at the Cato Institute event.