Intel Committee Chairmen Defend NSA PRISM Program: Human Intel Not Sufficient to Secure the Country

The chairman of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees strongly defended the National Security Agency’s PRISM program, which allows the agency to mine the Internet data of Americans, as well as the order requiring Verizon to turn over the records of its customers to the agency.

“These programs are within the law,” said California senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She went on to explain that the spying program is “walled off” within the NSA and that there are “limited numbers of people” who have access to the information mined from Internet and phone companies. “The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill, which has been held not to be private personal property by the Supreme Court.”

Feinstien argued that human intelligence is not sufficient to secure the country, and that only disciplined data mining can do so.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, echoed Feinstein’s claims, pointing to the 9/11 attacks as a turning point for the government’s national-security apparatus. “After 9/11, we realized there was a big hole in our ability to fully identify all the players in that terrorist plot.” That hole, Rogers explained, existed because phone companies immediately destroyed customer information. The NSA’s current program is merely a corrective to that program, requiring phone companies to put customer data in “a big box” that the government may mine to identify potential terrorists.