A bill that would allow the National Security Agency to continue the surveillance programs that became public when they were leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden is swiftly making its way through the Senate, according to the New York Times.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., are working on drafting a bill that will allow the NSA to continue to keep logs of every American's phone calls but would also make the once secret program more transparent and accountable to the American people, the New York Times reports.
The new legislation would continue to allow the NSA to collect all of the metadata but would "strictly limit access to the phone metadata records, expressly prohibit the collection of the content of phone calls" Feinstein said. It would also only allow the NSA to hold on to the records for a certain amount of time, according to USA Today.
The two senators from the Senate Intelligence Committee defended the surveillance program since none of the phone calls that were collected as metadata were ever listened to. They hailed the surveillance as a key tool in fighting terrorism, according to USA Today.
NSA Director Keith Alexander appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and avoided answering a question from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., about whether or not the spy agency has ever attempted to receive authorization to get a caller's location in the surveillance, according to the Washington Post.
"If you're responding to my question by not answering it because you think it's a classified matter, that is your right," Wyden said. "I believe this is something that the American people have a right to know - whether the NSA has ever collected or made plans to collect cell site information."
When Edward Snowden leaked the existence of the NSA's broad surveillance program it caused a great uproar among the American public. In the weeks since the revelation of the program the anger seems to have turned not toward the program's existence but toward the secrecy of the program.
"The leadership of your agencies built an intelligence-collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people," Wyden said. "Time and time again, the American people were told one thing about domestic surveillance in public forums while government agencies did something else in private."
