a little public scrutiny, part 2

congresscritters are now checking to see which side their bread is buttered on:

U.S. lawmakers say little political support for phone surveillance

(Reuters) - U.S. spy agencies went too far when they built a massive database of all daily telephone call records and may have jeopardized political support for the very law they relied on to create it, members of Congress said on Wednesday.

Lawmakers said at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that they doubted the legal provision had the votes to win renewal before it is set to expire in June 2015.

...

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin who was an author of the Patriot Act, said government lawyers had stretched the meaning of the legal provision beyond what he and other lawmakers had supported.

CALL TO STOP

"You have to change how you operate," Sensenbrenner told government officials who were testifying at the hearing. He added that otherwise, "you're not going to have it any more."

...

i suppose sensebrenner has made the supremes' life easier if they want to take a whack at FISA, since he's now disavowing that the administration is acting with "the intent of the congress".

OTOH, a little pity for the eavesdroppers:

Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the [mass eavesdropping] data collection was lawful because the government ignores the vast majority of phone records it has, looking only at those that it can prove to a [secret] court are tied directly to a terrorism suspect.

"The collection is only there and it is only valuable if it is used," Cole said.

Without the government database, he added, some records would disappear in as few as 15 months because telephone companies do not save the records.

poor, poor spooks: without spying on everybody, they'd have a mere fifteen months to figure out if somebody is plotting a terror attack. one would like to hope they're capable of unraveling dastardly plots a little faster than that...