By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Obama administration released narrowly selected and heavily censored documents and sent more officials to testify before Congress on Wednesday in an effort to defend the legality and value of the surveillance of all Americans’ telephone calls. The effort was a failure.
The documents clarified nothing of importance, and the hearing raised major new questions about whether the intelligence agencies had been misleading Congress and the public about the electronic dragnet. At the end of the day, we were more convinced than ever that the government had yet to come clean on the legal arguments and court orders underlying the surveillance.
The documents were released before the start of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the government’s secret surveillance programs, details of which were disclosed in documents published by The Guardian, a British newspaper, showing that the United States has been vacuuming up data on every phone call made by every American.
The administration released three documents. One was an April order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in secret, approving the collection of “all call detail records” from a company that was not named but was a Verizon subsidiary. The order resolved nothing about the fundamental question of why the program was needed and authorized in the first place.
It merely said the court was reauthorizing the National Security Agency to scoop up the data, based on an earlier order (for which even the docket number was blanked out) that set rules to make sure that the database was not used to go after innocent people. It referred to Justice Department assurances that the collection was relevant to “authorized investigations” of terrorism but provided no details.
But the administration has still not released the underlying legal arguments and the original rulings by the surveillance court on which the released order was based. Those documents are essential to public understanding about the data collection, as the chairman of the judiciary committee, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and other members pointed out forcefully on Wednesday.
The two other documents released Wednesday were letters to Congress saying the N.S.A. had really analyzed only a tiny fraction of the data it was collecting but failed to say why the enormous collection was necessary, legal or wise. Those legal arguments remain classified. The declassified letters said the collection efforts “significantly strengthen” the discovery of terrorists and their plots; the agency has previously claimed that 54 plots were disrupted by the collection of phone records and a separate, targeted collection of Internet data.
But those claims seemed to fade away on Wednesday. In his testimony, the best that John Inglis, deputy N.S.A. director, could come up with was that “there is an example” that “comes close to a ‘but for’ example.” Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who have been arguing for the termination of the bulk collection of telephone data, were joined by Mr. Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in criticizing the N.S.A. director, James Clapper Jr., for falsely telling Congress that the agency was not collecting large volumes of data on Americans’ phone calls.
“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official,” Mr. Grassley said.
We strongly agree and hope that the Senate does not drop its investigation of the data collection program or of Mr. Clapper’s behavior. The program should be halted at least until the public gets a satisfactory accounting.
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