The Obama administration briefed lawmakers 22 times on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act–the law that has been used to justify NSA’s email monitoring program, a senior official told the Huffington Post.
Section 702 gives the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence the authority to gather intelligence on non-U.S. citizens for up to one year.
The senior official provided data that showed that over the span of 14 months starting in October 2011, 22 separate briefings to Congress touched on the law. It’s not immediatelly clear, as the Huffington Post notes, to what extent those briefings covered the law or any the subsequent programs that have stemmed from its enactment.
Sen. Jon Thune (R-D) went as far as saying that “most members of Congress” were likely unaware of the breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
Read the full list of meetings here.
