Privacy in America panel convenes a year after Snowden

You're a conservative, people will tell the Sen Mike Lee (R-UT). How can you be critical of the rampant surveillance by the National Security Agency? But there's no contradiction there in Sen Lee's view.

It's more like a natural outgrowth of his beliefs. "Some of the programs threaten to undermine privacy," Sen Lee says, adding that the federal government is simply too intrusive.

Sen Lee was the kickoff speaker at a panel discussion roughly a year after the first revelations of widespread government snooping in classified documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While the Snowden disclosures have led triggered public concern about the impact of government surveillance on privacy, totally unapologetic was one of the panelists, Mike Hayden, a former head of the NSA and the CIA. Hayden, who said the panel's title should have included security as well as privacy, asserted several times that there have been no abuses in the collection of telephone records of ordinary American citizens not suspected of terrorism as well as the scooping up of e-mail in another program.

The colloquy, titled Privacy in America: The NSA, the Constitution and the USA Freedom Act, was sponsored by Microsoft, the ACLU and The Washington Times.