Sen. Rand Paul believes the U.S. Supreme Court should review the National Security Agency’s broad surveillance programs to determine if they are indeed constitutional as President Obama and the program’s advocates have asserted. But Rep. Pete King, a top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Paul is distorting the facts about the NSA and that President Obama needs to more aggressively defend it. “It’s up to the president to come up and defend it,” King said on Fox News Sunday. “This is the president’s program. He should be out there addressing the nation on this.” King, of New York, added that Obama, “has been relatively silent,” about the program. Sign Up for the Politics Today newsletter! Earlier in the show, Paul told host John Roberts the entire NSA surveillance program needs review by the nation’s highest court. He said that without the massive leak about the program’s activities, by rogue NSA contractor Edward Snowden, “we wouldn’t have known that [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper lied to the senate and said we weren’t collecting any data.” Paul said aspects of the NSA surveillance violate the Fourth Amendment and that a single warrant for probable cause does not legally justify the NSA’s collection of ” a billions records.” King said later on the show that no American’s rights were violated with the program. “What ever mistakes were made were inadvertent,” King said, adding that the NSA has “a 99.9 batting average,” that is more accurate than the media’s reporting accuracy. He then accused Paul of contributing “this whole tone of snooping and spying,” associated with the NSA, and called it a “smear and slander of good Patriotic Americans.” King called Paul’s criticism of the NSA, “a grab bag of misinformation and distortion.” For instance, King said, “He says there are a billion phone calls being collected and that is not even true.” The debate comes amid a new report that the NSA had committed thousands of privacy violations in its oversight. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., also appearing on Fox, called for the appointment of a special advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the surveillance warrants issued to the NSA. President Obama proposed the idea of a special advocate earlier this month. “The problem is with the system,” Blumenthal said. “It’s a black box. The FISA court is a secret tribunal issuing secret opinions making secret law, and a lot of it is completely unavailable, even to the members of the Intelligence Committee.”
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 16:05:25 +0000