State Of Deception

Even without a full picture of the programs, two senators who were not on the Intelligence Committee became intense critics of National Security Agency domestic surveillance: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In May, 2006, after the USA Today article appeared, then-Sen Biden said it was frightening to learn that the government was collecting telephone records. Obama’s objections to domestic surveillance stretched back even further. In 2003, as a Senate candidate, he called the Patriot Act “shoddy and dangerous.” And at the 2004 Democratic Convention, in the speech that effectively launched his eventual campaign for President, he took aim at the “library records” provision of the law. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he declared. In 2005, when he arrived in Washington, Sen Obama became one of Sen Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) new allies in his attempts to reform the law. The Patriot Act was up for reauthorization, and, at Wyden’s urging, the Senate was trying to scale back the “library records” section. One of the first bills that Obama co-sponsored, the Security and Freedom Enhancement Act, would have required that the government present “specific and articulable facts” if it wanted a court order for records, a much higher standard than the existing one. Sen Obama and several other senators, including John Kerry, now the Secretary of State, and Chuck Hagel, the current Secretary of Defense, laid out their legal case against the provision in a letter to colleagues on December 14, 2005. The Bush White House fought Obama’s changes, but offered a few minor concessions. Sen Wyden later learned that, while he and Obama were fighting to curtail Section 215, the NSA’s lawyers were secretly arguing before a court that the provision should allow the NSA to legally collect the phone records of all Americans.