Suffering under that issue. Many finding they cant keep the insurance play planned and like. Their premiums are rising. Uncertainty is growing about which parts of the law the president will decide to uphold. But in just these few months we have already seen reports of incidents where obama care hasnt adequately protected americans personal data. In one reported instance in minnesota, an Insurance Broker was accidentally provided the personal information of 2,400 people. Moreover, there are many Unanswered Questions about the websites ability to protect privacy Going Forward. Now i expect, in fact, i understand that the standards of the dedicated professionals in our Intelligence Community do not compare to those of the contractors who failed to set up the website that ive referred to. But its easy to see why Many Americans tend to be skeptical, then, that the government can adequately maintain their privacy when it collects vast amounts of information. The president s disengagement on these important matters doesnt help. He claims he was unaware of the problems with the obama care website before it was launched. Now reports say he was unaware of the reported surveillance of many world leaders. As i did back in october, i called on the president to lead. Many of these programs are critical to our National Security. The president needs to contribute to the National Debate by publicly explaining and defending them. Prince, a visit to ft. Meade would help. Im convinced there is a role for Greater Transparency, oversight and accountability in the fisa process. The public trust of our Intelligence Community must be rebuilt. We must ensure intelligence authorities are exercised in a manner consistent with our laws and constitution. These proposals should be subject to the same rigorous and critical examination to which were subject iing these proposals should address the specific concerns that are brought to light. These proposals shouldnt have a terrorist abroad shouldnt provide a feterrorist abroad wi rights similar to u. S. Citizens here at home. These proposals shouldnt make it more burdensome for authorities to investigation a terrorist than it is to investigate a common criminal. These proposals shouldnt return us to pre9 11 posture. The balance between protecting individual liberties and our National Security is a delicate one. And reasonable people can disagree about precisely where that balance must be struck. And thats our responsibility here in the congress of the United States. Our witnesses on both panels today represent a wide range of you. And i look forward to hearing their point of view. Before you start, mr. Chairman, id like to explain further something you brought up that i had a conflict. At 2 30 secretaries im skeptical of that agreement. But i have a responsibility to learn more about it. But i have to weigh going to that hearing to be here because im also, as leader of the republicans, know the importance of fisa and whatever work is done there for our National Security as well. The chairman did accommodate us to some extent by moving this ahead by a half hour. Im going to stay beyond that half hour anyway to ask questions at least of the first panel. I had asked the meeting to be rescheduled, and this chairmans prerogative to lead this committee as he sees necessity to do it. But i think its too bad this could not be worked out so that senators could attend both of these matters together. Thank you. I wish i could be at the other hearing, too. But weve had to reschedule this once already. And everybody has agreed to be here today. I didnt think it was fair to our witnesses to reschedule it again. Besides, a lot of these classified briefings, the one you just referred to, ive had to miss in the past because of conflicts. I find i can usually read almost all of what was said there in the paper the next day anyway. Usually in more detail. I agree with you on that point. Ill share my it kind of makes a mockery of what they call secured. Well, it depends upon whose ox is being gored, i guess its more of a question who can get it out quickest. I do recall one of these very highly classified matters that we had. The very first thing that came out top secret was a photograph of the cover of that one of that weeks news magazines. It went downhill from there. Our first witness is general Keith Alexander whos the director of the National Security agency. Began service at the u. S. Military academy at west point. Previously served as the commanding general of the u. S. Army intelligence in security command. Director of intelligence, u. S. Central command. Of course, general, i thank you for being here. Your full statement will be made part of the record. But in the time you have, please feel free to hit any points you want or summarize any way youd like. Chairman, thank you. Ill keep my opening remarks short. But i would like to hit a few key things. First, nsa is a foreign intelligence agency. Those acts and too manies that we do are to connect what we know about foreign intelligence to whats going on here in the United States. We need tools to bring that together. I want to talk briefly about some of those too manies. And some of those tools, like section 215, in my opinion, and i think in the courts, are constitutional. Were authorized by congress. Theyre legal. Theyre necessary. And theyve been effective. From my perspective, the threats are growing. When we look at whats going on in iraq today, whats going on in syria, the amount of People Killed from 1 september to 3 december is over 5,000 from terrorist related acts in iraq, syria and several other countries around the world. In iraq alone, in 2012 the total number killed was 2,400. From 1 september to 3 december, that has risen to 2,200 plus in a threemonth period. Its on the verge of a sectarian conflict. The crisis in the middle east is growing. And the threat to us from terrorist activities or safe havens and those being radicalized are growing. What we found out in 9 11, and i go back to senator grassley, your comments. We cant go back to a pre9 11 moment. Sir, i absolutely agree with that. So we have to find out what is the right way for our nation to defend ourselves and our allies and protect Civil Liberties and privacy. I think the way were doing section 215 is actually a good model, not just for our country but for the rest of the world. It has the courts, congress and the administration all involved. Why do i say that . The reason is, if you look at all the information that is out there, the billions and billions of books of information that are out there, there is no viable way to go through that information if you dont use meta data. In this case meta data is a way of knowing where those books are in the library and a way of focusing our collection the same that our allies do to look at where are the bad books. From our perspective, from the National Security agencys perspective, what we do is get great insights into the bad actors overseas. Under that information, we can take the information, the to, from. I put that on a little card. It says from number. The to number. The date. Time group of the call. And the duration. Thats the element of information we use in the 215. There is no content. There are no names. No email addresses. From my perspective, that is the least intrusive way that we can do this. If we could come up with a better way, we ought to put it on the table and argue our way through it. The issue that i see right now is there isnt a better way. What weve come up with is can we change one. Senator grassley, you brought out a great point. 9 11, we couldnt connect the dots because we didnt have this capability to say, someone outside the United States is trying to talk to someone inside the United States. We also had people in the administration that refused to listen to fbi agents who had picked up on what was happening here in the United States when they were told its not important, even though anybody with a brain in their head would have known it was. But go ahead. I understand your point. Thank you. Lets stick to the facts. Were not talking about a library. I had my First Library card when i was 4 years old. I understand libraries. Lets talk about the nsa. I think the important part for us, mr. Chairman, is how do you know how do you bring information you know from outside the country to that which we have inside . How do you connect the dots . Thats the issue with the meta data program. There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots. So that gets us back to do we not do that at all . Given that the threat is growing, i believe that is an unacceptable risk to our country. So what we have to do is, can we do more on the oversight and compliance . And there are things that are being looked at. But taking these programs off the table from my perspective is absolutely not the thing to do. I do agree with this discussion with industry as well that you brought up, chairman. Industry ought to be a player in here. They have been hurt by this. And i think unfairly hurt. We ought to put this on the table from two perspectives. Industry has some technical capabilities that may be better than what we have. If they have ideas of what we could do better to protect this nation and our Civil Liberties and privacy, we should put it on the table. And i think we should have a way of bringing government and industry together for the good of the nation. And we ought to take those steps. So, mr. Chairman, i just want to conclude with this statement. Were a foreign intelligence agency. Our job is to figure out whats going on outside the United States and to provide that level of information to the fbi and others who are operating inside the United States. To date, weve not been able to come up with a better way of doing it. Im not wet. Wed, i dont think anybody is wed to a specific program. We do need something to help connect the dots. Something to help defend this country. We think these programs have been effective. Thats all i have, mr. Chairman. Thank you, chairman leahy, Ranking Member quite all right. James cole first joined the department of justice in 1979. Served for 13 years in the colonel division. He later become deputy chief of the divisions Public Integrity section before entering private practice. And was sworn as the Deputy Attorney general on january 3rd, 2011. Please go ahead, mr. Cole. Thank you, chairman leahy, Ranking Member grassley and distinguished members of the committee for inviting us here to talk about the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act. Im going to focus my opening remarks just on the 215 program. As has been mentioned, it involves the collection of meta data from telephone calls, including the number that was dialed, the date and the time of the call and the length of the call. It does not include the content of any phone calls, any names, addresses or Financial Information of any party to the call. And under 215, it does not include any cell site Location Information. The government can search this data only if it has a reasonable arctic ewe labl suspicion that the phone number being searched is associated with certain terrorist organizations. Only a small number of analysts can make that determination. And that determination must be documented so it can be reviewed by a supervisor and later reviewed for compliance purposes. And only a small portion of these records actually end up being searched. This program is conducted pursuant to authorization by the fisa court. Since the court originally authorized this program back in 2006, it has been reapproved on 35 separate occasions by 15 individual article 3 judges on the fisa court. Oversight of the 215 program involves all three branches of government. Within the executive branch, numerous entities and nsa, the department of justice and the office of the director of National Intelligence are involved in assessing compliance. We report any compliance incidents to the fisa court immediately. With respect to congress, we have reported any significant compliance problems such as those uncovered in 2009 to the intelligence and judiciary committees of both houses. Documents related to those 2009 problems have since been declassified and have been released by the dni. Over the past several months, weve also gone to Great Lengths to better explain publicly why the program is lawful. Under section 215 there must be reasonable grounds to believe that the records that are collected are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against International Terrorism. As both the fisa courts opinions and our own 22page white paper explained, relevant is a very broad term. In its ordinary sense, information is relevant to an investigation if it bears upon or is pertinent to that investigation. Courts have held that large repositories of information can satisfy relevance standard where the search of the whole repository is necessary in order to identify the critical documents. This is precisely the rationale that underlying the 215 Collection Program, and it was recognized by the fisa court. The court found that the entire collection of bulk meta data is relevant to an authorized International Terrorism investigation because it is necessary, a necessary part of the process, to allow nsa to identify phone calls between terrorists and other persons. As judge egans recent opinion reauthorized and the program recognized, and i quote, because the subset of terrorist communications is ultimately contained within the whole of the meta data produced, but can only be found after the production is aggregated and queried using identifiers determined to be associated with the identified International Terrorist organizations, the whole production is relevant to the Ongoing Investigation out of necessity. In addition to compliance with 215, nsas program must also comply with the Fourth Amendment of the constitution. Here the Supreme Courts decision in smith versus maryland is directly on point. In smith the court held that telephone users who convey information to phone companies for the purpose of routing their calls have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. Now, the smith case is a number of years ago. And some have questioned the applicability of it because it didnt concern a situation where the government collected and retained the bulk meta data and aggregated it all in one place. However, a recent opinion of the fisa court addressed this specific issue, and it noted where one individual does not have a Fourth Amendment interesting with grointeres interest, grouping together a large number of similarly situated individuals cannot springing into existence. I understand that there is interest in legislating reforms to the 215 program and other aspects of fisa including the nature of the Court Process itself. We welcome this public debate and this public discussion about whether the current version of 215 and other provisions of fisa strike the right balance between our National Security and the privacy of our citizens. Both of which are important and have to be honored. We look forward to working with the committee to address these issues and to find the right balance. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you. Thank you very much, mr. Cole. And our last witness on this panel will be robert litt. Confirmed by the senate in 2009. He served as general counsel of the office of the director of National Intelligence. Prior to joining odni he was partner with the law firm arnold porter. Worked at the department of justice. And has testified before this committee before. Welcome back, mr. Litt. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Ranking member grassley. Members of the subcommittee. We do appreciate the opportunity to appear today to continue our discussions about the intelligence activities that are conducted pursuant to the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act. Its critical to assume that the public dialogue on this topic is grounded in fact rather than in misconceptions. And we therefore understand the importance of helping the public to understand how the Intelligence Community actually uses the legal authorities provided by congress to gather foreign intelligence and the extent to which there is vigorous oversight of those activities to ensure they comply with the law. As you know the president directed the Intelligence Community to make as much information as possible available without certain intelligence programs that were the subject of unauthorized disclosure. Consistent with protecting National Security and sensitive sources and methods. Since that time, the director of National Intelligence has declassified and released thousands of pages of documents about these programs. Including court orders and a variety of other documents. Were continuing to do so. These documents demonstrate both that the programs were authorized by law and that they were subject t