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NSA Evasive On Congressional Spying Question

The National Security Agency has so far refused to answer a question that Senator Bernie Sanders posed to them last week: “Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?”

The agency has been under heavy scrutiny since last June when British newspaper The Guardian began publishing documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The documents outline extensive domestic surveillance operations, which included collecting metadata on Americans’ phone calls and  bypassing data encryption designed to keep digital information private. (The metadata collected by the agency includes when the call was made and which phone numbers were involved, but not what was said).

Sanders’ letter to General Keith Alexander, who oversees the NSA, asked if the agency was collecting information about members of Congress. In an email to VPR, NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller said that the NSA’s work “include[s] procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons,” and that “members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”

She did not say whether the NSA was collecting data about members of Congress, and did not respond to additional questions Monday morning.

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders, said that the Senator’s office hasn’t received a response to the Jan. 3 letter, “although it ordinarily takes weeks for agencies to answer a senator’s questions in a letter.”

Taylor was VPR's digital reporter from 2013 until 2017. After growing up in Vermont, he graduated with at BA in Journalism from Northeastern University in 2013.
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