How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
McConnell did so utterly unchastened by a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month, which said that the law did not actually allow the N.S.A. to do the things that the agency did in its name. Section 215 says that the N.S.A. can, after going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, compel the production of “tangible things” that are “relevant” to an “authorized investigation.” As the Second Circuit found, the N.S.A. treated the entire universe of American phone records as one tangible thing, broadened relevance to the point of meaninglessness, and ignored the limitations that the law placed on what counted as a specific investigation, to the point that “the government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti-terrorism’ investigation, and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”
.. Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, who has been a leader in trying to get Congress to fulfill its intelligence-oversight responsibilities, picked up on the theme of trust in his own speech on Sunday evening, in which he pointed out that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, lied to him in a Senate hearing when asked about bulk collection—even though Wyden had told him in advance that he’d ask the question.