Ron Wyden Has a Problem

“From a policy standpoint, it is in my view representative of the problem that this debate was started by Mr. Snowden as opposed to the Congress and the elected officials of this country.”

  National Memo

I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Ron Wyden is a member of Congress who was privy to the secret law interpretations and the NSA’s data mining, and he has a problem with the fact that Snowden broke the news and not Congress?  As a congressman, Mr. Wyden wouldn’t even have had to flee the country had he broken the news publicly, much less taken it to the entire Congress, which he did not.

I was already aware of the fact that millions and millions of records were being collected on law-abiding people. And I had spent all that time dealing with the fact that the head of the NSA had said, “we don’t collect any data at all,” and I kept trying to pin that down because, again, it just cried out for follow-up. We weren’t able to get answers, and that’s why I notified [Director of National Intelligence] General [James] Clapper the day before the public hearing, that I was going to ask him on the record to respond… He had said repeatedly that they don’t collect data. We were very troubled by all those comments because they were in a public forum…So I think I’ll leave it at that.

We noticed.