Congress reacted to snowden and theyre saying hmm, maybe it is not quite so scary as we thought to go against the government. I want to move on because of the time. But, mieke, i thought you might have the best view into how might this ruling influence the politics of this, the congressional will . I think that the court the Second Circuit clearly put this back in congress lap and said, look, congress did not explicitly authorize this Bulk Collection Program under 2150 and if they want to be explicit about that, they need to act they made note of the timeline. But their analysis of the 215 program suggests that they would not look kindly upon it the way that it is currently constructed. I also think that the politics of this right now here in the house, it is unlikely that you would get a clean reauthorization of the existing program through. And so the real question for senator mcconnell is, do you take the reform legislation or do you let the program expire . So to move on to so i wa
When president bush instituted it and president obama continued it, they didnt have an open discussion about whether the country should have such a program. And actually that seems to run through a little bit of yesterdays opinion by judge lynch. Even dick cheney. This is something that i discovered in writing this book that nobody had ever seen before. When he wrote his dissent in the irancontra matter, he said if you have a hard Foreign Policy or National Security issue, a wise president first would not engage in excessive secrecy, and, second, a wise president would have a full and open democratic discussion in which he would attempt to persuade the public of the need for validity of a broad program. The concept delineating between the number of people affected or how targets are picked, versus the program itself, i think is valuable, and it gets to a question that i would like a from everybody on. There is a trust problem that now exists, for whatever series of reasons. An example
Patrick to explain it and bob to comment, but to present the severe dissonance that exists in terms of what this is. Nancy, described it as phoning up investigations and said shed never heard it anything like it. And senior dea officials called it decades old, a bedrock concept. And nancy was a judge, by the way. Patrick . Mr. Toomey to describe what and some of the critical criminal cases we litigate, and articles described, and articles have expended on especially to the deas program and recent disclosure of bulk collection of phone calls out of the u. S. , parallel construction is an effort to construct a parallel source for certain evidence in investigations. It often occurs in certain senses. Where we see it or wait believe it happened where investigators obtain information using one authority, which is potentially controversial or novel or legally untested in the court and they rely on that authority to obtain information. Investigation proceeds with a bit of it and on the base o
As a lawyer, you know the difference between an untruth and a mistake. When clapper was asked that question, it was a public hearing and director clapper said for him, he liked public hearings as much as he liked root canals or folding sheets. He had two huge notebooks to prepare for the hearing, neither which talked about surveillance. We were notified the day before that senator wyden was going to ask this question. He was hit unaware by the question. If you read his answer, it is perfectly clear that he is thinking about the 702 program when he talks about not wittingly collecting. After this hearing, i went to him and said, you know, you were wrong. It was perfectly clear that he had absolutely forgotten the existence of the 215 program. This is not an untruth or falsehood, this was a mistake on his part. We all make mistakes. I would say i made a mistake as well thereafter because i did not think to counsel him that we should immediately send a classified letter to the committee c
Is the balance that has to be struck in any kind of legislation like this. Mr. Vitka i would think the most informative part there, for policy makers, would be the number of americans who are affected, and i do not mean the numbers who are targeted, that it would indicate a pretty broad number that would not drive down to something that would compromise surveillance operations. Bob, is that the case, or am i mistaken . Mr. Litt it is difficult for me to answer that. There are other considerations that go into the issues of exactly what we can and cannot report beyond is it a good idea to report this or not and those are the kinds of things in many instances that i cannot talk about in this kind of a session. Mr. Vitka would you agree it would be exculpatory for the community to say that 100,000 americans were affected versus 300 million americans . Mr. Litt i am not comfortable with the word exculpatory. People would be happier if there were smaller numbers than if there are larger num