Obama says NSA has plenty of congressional oversight. But one congressman says it’s a farce.

Defenders of the National Security Agency's domestic spying have argued that Congress had full knowledge of the agency's programs, so if you want to be mad at anyone, be mad at them. "These programs were originally authorized by Congress," President Barack Obama said shortly after Ed Snowden made his initial revelations. "They have been repeatedly authorized by Congress. Bipartisan majorities have approved them. Congress is continually briefed on how these are conducted." But Rep Justin Amash (R-MI), a vocal opponent of NSA spying programs, says that congressional oversight of intelligence programs is "broken."

While the Senate Intelligence committee sent out briefing information about the programs to members of the upper chamber, Rep Amash says the House Intelligence Committee "decided it wasn't worthwhile to share this information" with members of the House. Instead, he says, the committee offered members an opportunity to attend some classified briefings and review the documents in the committee chamber. Rep. Amash describes those briefings as a farce. And his account of trying to get details out of those giving the briefings sounds like an exercise in frustration: “So you don't know what questions to ask because you don't know what the baseline is. So you have to start just spitting off random questions: Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don't know what kind of things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a totally ridiculous game of 20 questions,” Rep Amash said.