NSA declines to confirm it tracks movements via cell phone signals
US spy agency chief pressed about the use it makes of Americans' mobile phone signals, as senators push rival bills to curb its activities
The top US intelligence official has sidestepped questions from a senator about whether the National Security Agency has used Americans' mobile phone signals to collect information on their whereabouts that would allow tracking of the movements of individual callers.
Asked twice by Senator Ron Wyden if the NSA had ever collected or made plans to collect such data, NSA chief General Keith Alexander answered both times by reading from a letter provided to senators who had asked the same question last summer. He also cited a classified version of the letter that was sent to senators and said, "What I don't want to do ... is put out in an unclassified forum anything that's classified."
Wyden promised to keep asking. "I believe this is something the American people have a right to know," he said.
The testy exchange at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing illustrates the wider tension that has grown between the public and the US intelligence community, following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the collection of telephone and email records of millions of Americans.
The panel's bipartisan leadership used the hearing to promote their version of legislation to change the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. The lawmakers seek to trim NSA's authority to access and analyse US phone records and provide new protections for Americans' privacy. They also want to broaden the government's spying powers to allow monitoring of terror suspects who travel to the US after being tracked overseas by the NSA.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the committee, said the legislation would "strictly limit access to the ... phone metadata records, expressly prohibit the collection of the content of phone calls" and limit the amount of time such US phone call data could be kept. Such records show the date and length of calls, and the numbers dialled.