NSA awards itself A+ for accountability – as it happened
• 'This agency in every case reports on itself' - Alexander
• Leahy calls for 'common-sense' legislation
• Administration opposes public advocate for Fisa court
• Read the blog summary
• Leahy calls for 'common-sense' legislation
• Administration opposes public advocate for Fisa court
• Read the blog summary
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Good afternoon and welcome to our live blog coverage of testimony by General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, before the Senate judiciary committee. Alexander is expected to take questions about various surveillance programs and to argue against pending legislation designed to curtail those programs.
The NSA reform legislation, which is expected to come up for debate next month, has 120 bipartisan co-sponsors in both chambers. One of the bill's co-authors, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, chairs today’s committee. The vaguely wishful, vaguely self-congratulatory title of the hearing is Continued Oversight of US Government Surveillance Authorities.
Alexander's many appearances on Capitol Hill since details of NSAprograms first came out in June have hewed to well-worn themes: surveillance keep Americans more safe, Alexander says, and the exposure of the programs has made Americans less so.
It has proven difficult to assess the director's claims because the details remain classified. Some of the early headline claims, however, have shown signs of unraveling. Chief among these is Alexander’s claim that NSA spying has averted more than 50 terror threats worldwide, a figure that upon closer examination seems to include such a grab-bag of activity as to represent a tally of nothing.
As usual, Alexander's appearance on the Hill comes amid new, damning revelations about potential overreach by NSA. The world has recently discovered that the agency collects 5bn records a day on cell phones around the world and that it infers relationships based on mobile location data, in seeming – but perhaps not technical – contradiction of testimony by intelligence officials that the agency does not collect so-called "geolocation" data. On Monday, the world's biggest tech companies published an open letter saying that NSA surveillance undermined basic rights and freedoms and calling for reform.
Also scheduled to testify today are deputy attorney general James Cole and Robert S. Litt, general council for the office of the director of national intelligence. The hearing is to begin at 2pm ET.
While we wait, you might read Ryan Lizza's huge piece in this week's New Yorker, "State of Deception: Why won't the president rein in the intelligence community?" Or dive into the Guardian's complete NSA files.
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