On Friday, Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva called the National Security Agency’s overreaching domestic surveillance programs “a serious breach of faith between the federal government and the American people” and called on the administration to curtail and explain the excessive records sweeps documented over the past 48 hours.
“Senator Obama would not have supported this program under President Bush,” Grijalva said. “A secretive intelligence agency gathering millions of phone records and using them as it sees fit is the kind of excess many of us warned about after the Patriot Act became law. Continuing this program indefinitely gives the impression of being under constant siege and needing to know everything at all times to keep us safe, which I find a very troubling view of American security policy.”
Grijalva called for the court decisions approving the program – which is not limited to Verizon Business Networks and did not originate in April of this year, according to multiple reports – to be released so Congress and the public can understand the scope of the effort.
“We’re being assured that this is limited, supervised and no big deal,” Grijalva said in the statement released Friday. “When we heard the same under President Bush, we weren’t comfortable taking his word for it and moving on. I feel the same today.”
Breitbart.com reported on Friday morning, that Obama defended his administration’s surveillance programs by explaining that “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.”
According to Breitbart, “There’s only one problem: both Republican and Democrat Congresspeople say that isn’t true. On Friday afternoon, the press office for Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), one of the authors of the Patriot Act, tweeted, “Obama’s claim that ‘every Member of Congress’ was briefed is FALSE.”
Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said on MSNBC that he knew of the program, “because I specifically sought it out. It’s not something that’s briefed outside the Intelligence Committee.”