Lawmakers Deny Knowing About Cell Phone, Internet Tracking

Newsmax

Saturday, 08 Jun 2013 10:07 AM

By Sandy Fitzgerald

Congressional intelligence briefing sessions have not included details about President Barack Obama’s data-gathering programs, despite claims by the president that Congress approved the measures and “every member” knew about them, Republican Rep. Aaron Schock said.

“I can assure you the phone number tracking of non-criminal, non-terrorist suspects was not discussed,” the Illinois lawmaker told Politico. “Most members have stopped going to their classified briefings because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know in the news. It really has become a charade.”

Responding to the furor over the National Security Agency’s data monitoring programs, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced legislation Friday that requires a warrant be issued before any government agency can search phone records of Americans.

Paul calls the revelation of the program to collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers “an astounding assault on the Constitution.”

But meanwhile, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle deny Obama’s claims that they knew about plans to monitor cell phone and Internet use of Americans, and many said they either learned of the programs through the news or after asking specifically to be briefed.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that the average member of Congress doesn’t receive such briefings, and would not have know about programs to monitor cell phone records and Internet use unless they were on an intelligence committee, like Schock, were in special sessions in 2011 or asked to be briefed.

Durbin said he only learned about the two programs after asking for a briefing after being urged by Democratic Sen Ron Wyden of Oregon.

And while Obama said members of Congress “could raise those issues very aggressively,” Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland told Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday that the news that Congress was “fully briefed” came as a surprise to her and other lawmakers.

“This ‘fully briefed’ is something that drives us up the wall, because often ‘fully briefed’ means a group of eight leadership; it does not necessarily mean relevant committees,” Mikulski said.

Briefings were made available, and regularly given to those on House and Senate intelligence committees, but weren’t offered — except by request — to other lawmakers.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has in the past invited all 100 senators to read a classified report concerning “roving authority for electronic surveillance” in a secure location in the Hart Senate Office Building, but Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she does not know how many actually read the report.

In addition, nine senators and 61 congressmen have taken office after the 2010 and 2011 briefings, and new members like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas say they were not informed of either program without asking about it.

“Americans trusted President Obama when he came to office promising the most transparent administration in history,” Cruz said Friday. “But that trust has been broken and the only way to earn it back is to tell the truth.”

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/congress-obama-surveillance-tracking/2013/06/08/id/508783?s=al&promo_code=13C51-1

H/T to Dave for article

Do we have anyone in Washington who does know anything. Naturally, there are a lot of new members. For Obama to claim everyone was briefed was yet another lie. What’s one more when you’re on a roll?

Big Brother is in the house…

Huelskamp: Government Surveillance Like ‘Big Brother’

Friday, 07 Jun 2013 — Newsmax

By Jim Meyers and John Bachman

Rep. Tim Huelskamp tells Newsmax that revelations about the government’s surveillance operations are “astonishing” — and calls the federal government “Big Brother.”

The Kansas Republican also says it is “pretty evident” that Attorney General Eric Holder and people at the IRS have lied to Congress.

Rep. Huelskamp was first elected in 2010 and ran unopposed in 2012. He is a member of the Tea Party Caucus.

Members of Congress as well as ordinary citizens have been stunned by disclosures about a secret government intelligence operation targeting millions of Americans’ phone, email, and Internet records as a tool to fight terrorism.

“There are things going on here that are particularly worrisome,” Huelskamp says in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV on Friday.

“This is not targeted to suspected terrorists, this is anybody who uses the phone in this country or uses YouTube or Apple or Skype.

“You know as we speak here there’s a record being made somewhere in Washington that we actually called one another on this phone line. That has never been indicated to me, and most of my colleagues are probably completely unaware that the administration was engaged in this type of monitoring of American citizens.

“It is shocking that we’re relying on media sources for this to be released – a British newspaper and now finally some newspapers here in this country.

“There are some folks that are claiming they were fully aware in Congress that this was going on. I was not one of them. I certainly would not have voted for the Patriot Act knowing they were pulling down hundreds of millions of phone records and categorizing and keeping them somewhere in Washington, D.C.

“I don’t trust them with the information. They’ve got a long history of leaking data as indicated by these news reports. So we will have a closed door session with the NSA and other folks on Monday and hopefully we’ll start getting some answers on this, but this is astonishing and this has never been revealed to me or most members of Congress.”

Asked about the “leaking,” Huelskamp says: “Data in the federal government has been notoriously open to hacking. I serve on the Veterans Affairs Committee. We just discovered earlier this week that up to 20 million private medical and financial data records of veterans in this country have been hacked, potentially by a Chinese-related company.

“These are the same folks that are supposedly protecting all of our telephone records that they have taken without permission and without warrant, we believe. So I’m worried about them having that information — number one, what are they going to do with it, but also who else might access that information when you have a government that can’t even protect records of veterans?”

The Department of Homeland Security “was supposedly watching the data at the VA and we know that they don’t know what they’ve lost. We know Chinese hackers went inside the system. I just say that Americans are very upset that the federal government, Washington, Big Brother, can come in here and take a look at all their phone records.

More: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/huelskamp-government-surveillance-big/2013/06/07/id/508754?s=al&promo_code=13C49-1#ixzz2VgcMYcqr