On Wednesday lawmakers from both parties called for the vast collection of private data on millions of Americans to be scaled back. During a sometimes contentious hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans and Democrats told administration officials that they believed the government had exceeded the surveillance authorities granted by Congress. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/us/politics/bipartisan-backlash-grows-against-domestic-surveillance.html?from=us Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, said that no one in Congress believed that the counterterrorism laws enacted since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were meant to allow for the collection of phone records of virtually everyone in America.
“The government is stockpiling sensitive personal data on a grand scale,” said Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida. “Intelligence officers, contractors and personnel only need a rubber-stamp warrant from the FISA court to then learn virtually everything there is to know about an American citizen,”
Wednesday’s hearing was part of a counteroffensive emerging against the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance since the scope of the spying operations was exposed by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A.
In a letter to top administration officials, a coalition group of Silicon Valley companies and civil liberties groups will ask that the government start opening up the surveillance process by allowing companies to publicly disclose the number of secret requests for data they receive from the N.S.A. contractor.
The letter does not demand an end to the domestic surveillance.
Some businesses have previously received legal immunity from Congress for their involvement with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, and have close and longstanding ties to the N.S.A.
“The commercial issue is whether people around the world are going to trust American Internet companies with their data,”
