Chairman Nunes backs collection of phone data

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) is pushing lawmakers to reauthorize the government collection of Americans telephone records before the authority expires in Summer 2015.

Chairman Nunes also said there is no need to make reforms to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has approved the data collection numerous times. “We don’t want to further encumber intelligence and law enforcement communities who already have a difficult task in tracking those who wish to attack Americans at home and abroad,” he said. Civil liberties advocates see the legislation's expiration date deadline as an opportunity to push reforms to the program that authorizes the National Security Agency's collection of Americans’ telephone metadata -- the call times, numbers and durations, but not the content. Chairman Nunes said he plans to talk to lawmakers about the program and provide freshman lawmakers with top-secret briefings on the authorization. Chairman Nunes said a lot of the opposition to the program stems from misunderstanding. But he disagreed that the government should have provided a public outline of the collection before details of it leaked from documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Other intelligence programs should also be kept secret, he said, arguing the leaks have done damage to intelligence gathering.