In a statement released Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) strongly suggested Director of National Intelligence James Clapper misled Congress about the extent of surveillance on U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA), saying:

One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions. When NSA Director Alexander failed to clarify previous public statements about domestic surveillance, it was necessary to put the question to the Director of National Intelligence[...] Now public hearings are needed to address the recent disclosures and the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives.

The exchange referenced in the statement occurred during a hearing in March, when Wyden specifically asked for clarification about an earlier comment from NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander which claimed the agency did not collect dossiers about American citizens. Wyden, noting he wasn’t entirely sure what dossier meant in this context, pointedly inquired, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No.” When pressed on the issue by Wyden, he softened his answer to “Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” A video of the exchange is available here.

In light of the revelation last week that Verizon and other telecommunication companies were ordered by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to turn over metadata on all calls on their networks in United States, Clapper’s statement now appears at odds with the facts. It’s hard to believe Clapper thought the NSA’s collection of metadata on all calls in the U.S. wouldn’t include the call records of American citizens. According to Wyden’s statement, he shared the question with Clapper in advance and offered to allow him to amend his answer after the fact.

For his part, Clapper told NBC he thought Wyden’s inquiry was “not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no” so he responded in what he believed to be “the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, ‘No.’” It should also be noted that officials typically decline to discuss the details of classified programs during public hearings.

Wyden has long been critical of legal interpretations authorizing government snooping remaining secret. In a letter from himself and Sen. Mark Udall (R-CO) to Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012, he said “most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act” and argued there was a “significant gap” between what most Americans believe the law allows for and how it is being interpreted.

Other details from the letter says that Clapper’s denials at the March hearing were part of a pattern of the Obama Administration refusing to discuss the details of surveillance programs. Despite a letter the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote to Wyden and Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV) Wyden in August 2009 to announce the establishment of a regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions of the FISA, not a single opinion had been released in the two and a half years since.

In the letter Wyden also said the secrecy was a problem “because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” This mirrors comments by NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s justification for releasing documents about government surveillance programs, who said at least now the public has “the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

Wyden is part of a bipartisan group of Senators supporting a bill introduced today to declassify important Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions, allowing the public to learn how the government is interpreting their legal authority to snoop under the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA.

In an open letter to Attorney General Holder and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director Mueller, Google asks the agencies to let them publish aggregate numbers about secret requests for digital surveillance. The letter cites the confusing reports on the level of access tech companies allow the NSA and the FBI following the PRISM leaks last week, saying that in the absence of being able to tell the public about the number and scale of requests they receive, it’s impossible to combat them:

Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.

We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.

Google has flatly denied that the government has direct access or a “backdoor” into its servers. In a blogpost suggestively titled “What the…?” last week from Google CEO Larry Page and David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer, say the tech giant provides “user data to governments only in accordance with the law” and their legal team “reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process.”

The government allowed Google to start reporting the number of national security letters they received requesting data earlier this year, but they are still barred from releasing information about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders. Without being able to include this information, it’s impossible for their transparency report to fully reflect the breadth of surveillance in Google services.

A bipartisan group of legislators is supporting a bill introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) today, aimed at shedding light on secret court opinions that define controversial government surveillance programs. The legislation would require the Attorney General to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions, allowing the public to know how the government is interpreting their legal authority to snoop under the USA PATRIOT Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In a statement to the press Sen. Merkley said, “Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law.” This echoes a sentiment expressed by National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden, who said he released documents related to secret government surveillance programs so that the public would have “the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

Leaks originating from Snowden last week revealed details of NSA programs collecting telephone and internet metadata, and caused a media firestorm over the exact details how the government can access the content of online communications.

Activists are also demanding transparency about government surveillance programs, with a broad coalition that includes organizations such as Mozilla, FreePress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), launching a petition page to “demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

Merkley offered the same bill to declassify FISC rulings as an amendment to the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 last December, but it was rejected by the Senate on a 54-37 vote.

Much of the initial coverage of last week’s leaks about the National Security Agency (NSA) online snooping focused on a content gathering program called PRISM. But buried in the Washington Post’s original coverage were a few tantalizing details about another program code-named BLARNEY that bears a striking resemblance to the one alleged in a prominent court case over the existence of a dragnet online surveillance program.

The details of the BLARNEY program revealed so far appear to closely match the testimony and documents of former AT&T employee and whistleblower Mark Klein. Klein worked at AT&T for twenty-two years, retiring in 2004. During that time, he has testified he witnessed the installation of a fiber-optic splitting device in the San Francisco office where he worked, with a copy of all data being diverted to a room controlled by the NSA. In that room was “powerful computer equipment connecting to separate networks” and with the capability to “analyze communications at high speed.” As part of his testimony, he also provided AT&T documents that included diagrams of the splitter technology used.

In a conversation with ThinkProgress, Cindy Cohn, Legal Director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which is litigating the Jewel v. NSA case, agreed BLARNEY “appears to be what we’ve been saying, and what Mark Klein’s evidence shows.”

According the Washington Post, BLARNEY gathers up metadata from choke points along the backbone of the Internet as part of “an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.” A slide later revealed by The Guardian lists the program as an upstream option for data collection, which relies on sucking up information “on fiber cables and infrastructure as it flows past.” From those descriptions, it sounds somewhat analogous to an internet version of the broad telephone metadata collection authorized in the Verizon order revealed last week, which some electronic privacy advocates believes oversteps the authority of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts.

Klein’s testimony and documents form the basis of the ongoing Jewel v. NSA court case originally filed in 2008, which alleges “an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the ‘N.S.A.’) and other defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies.” A similar case against the telecommunications company, Hepting v. AT&T, was dismissed following the passage of retroactive immunity for telecom companies in the 2008 renewal of the FISA.

Three former NSA intelligence analysts, William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe have also backed the Jewel case, saying the NSA either has, or is in the process of obtaining, the ability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers like “secret room” described by Klein.

The Obama administration moved to dismiss the Jewel case in 2009, invoking the “state secrets” privilege and saying that it was immune from the suit. It was instead dismissed on standing grounds, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it could proceed to district court in December 2011. In September 2012 the government again renewed it’s state secret argument. Last Friday the government responded to the NSA leaks by requesting delay on any decisions on pending motions until it can file a new status report taking newly public information into account.

An ominous looking map released by The Guardian over the weekend purporting to show where the National Security Agency (NSA) snoops on metadata may not be as scary as the initial report suggested, although other evidence suggests data about U.S. citizens is being collected by the spy agency.

The Guardian report details a tool called Boundless Informant that allows an at a glance understanding of the amount of metadata being siphoned from “computer and telephone networks” across the globe via signal intelligence (SIGINT) infrastructure. This presumably would include metadata about telephone calls, text messages, and internet traffic such as information about the source of a message, the time stamp and duration, and general geographic location — but intelligence on the content of the communications. According The Guardian, over a 30-day period in March 2013 the agency showed 97 billion pieces of intelligence in the system, nearly 3 billion of those associated with the United States.

While 3 billion may seem like a huge volume of data, consider that 2.19 trillion text messages alone were sent in the United States in 2012. Breaking that down into a monthly figure, that’s roughly 182.5 billion text message sent in the US per month. And this system should in theory also include call, email and web traffic metadata, with each use of those communications platforms creating multiple bits of metadata associated with the sender, time, and other non-content details. Considering that volume, 3 billion pieces of metadata intelligence coming from within the United States may actually represent a very targeted level of surveillance that could plausibly be limited to persons reasonably believed to be foreign nationals.

But another detail from the associated documents suggests Boundless Informant doesn’t tell the whole story of metadata surveillance within the United States. Under the header “Do You Have All The Data? What Data Is Missing?” on a factsheet about the program, it says that due to the security level of the tool it does not include intelligence from “ECI or FISA,” referring to data collected pursuant to electronic crimes investigations or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders.

This means it likely does not reflect the bulk of metadata collected from Verizon and other telecommunication companies about nearly all calls because the orders came through FISA courts. Similarly, if FISA courts are issuing similar orders to internet service providers or tech companies for that level of information about email and web traffic, Boundless Informant wouldn’t report on that intelligence. Despite rhetoric from the government suggesting that metadata collection isn’t as invasive as collecting the contents of communications, it can be used to track movements over time, and infer a detailed picture of relationships and other aspects of an individual’s life by mapping out patterns of communications.

On the campaign trail, candidate Barack Obama decried the privacy invasions of the Bush surveillance program in 2007, saying it put “forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Though these comments referred to different (and, often, illegal) programs than the ones now being widely discussed, we now know that surveillance programs started under the Bush administration have been extensively expanded during his presidency.

First, The Guardian exposed the tip of the iceberg, releasing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order compelling Verizon to turn over metadata on nearly all calls, such as phone numbers, time stamps, and cell site location data. It was later revealed that this was a continuation of a seven year program involving all major telecommunications companies. This program would have been significantly curtailed, however, if a younger Obama’s attempt to limit such surveillance had succeeded. In 2005, then-Senator Obama co-sponsored the SAFE Act, which would have would drastically limited this sort of dragnet surveillance by amending the USA PATRIOT Act to require intelligence agencies show “specific and articulable facts” that a target was an “agent of a foreign power” before accessing phone records.

Soon after news of the Verizon order leaked, more details about the broad scope of American surveillance programs came out. On Thursday, The Guardian and the Washington Post revealed two programs, codenamed PRISM and BLARNEY with broad online surveillance implications — PRISM deals with the content of foreigners’ online communication (but with a very low threshold of proof that likely resulted in many American citizens’ privacy being “incidentally” compromised); BLARNEY appears to involve a broad collection of digital metadata. While tech companies have denied direct access to their servers or to their data as compelled by the law and the Post has since backtracked on that aspect of their report, that doesn’t rule out the NSA obtaining copies of that data. Subsequent coverage by the Wall Street Journal suggests the government also has access to credit card and Internet service provider (ISP) data.

But while revelations about both programs produced outrage, a White House spokesman told reporters aboard Air Force One Thursday before the PRISM story broke that the phone log data collection was a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats” and that “[t]he president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.”

Unlike the warrantless wiretapping programs of the Bush administration, the Obama administration asserts PRISM is legal under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That section stemmed from the Protect America Act (PAA), signed by President Bush in 2007, which many at the time warned could end up being used to implement broad surveillance programs with “no meaningful judicial oversight.”

A statement from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper declassifying some details of the phone data collection program released late last night decried the leaks that exposed the surveillance programs as threatening to do “potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”

President Obama’s transition from a Senator and presidential candidate who objected to the specter of a surveillance state existing outside of the law (either on ideological grounds or to score political points) to a president who embraced the the expansion of of similar programs after they gained a cloak of legal legitimacy is perhaps unsurprising: The power and access to intelligence information that comes with the position can change perspectives. But the pre-presidential Obama seemed to understand the way an overaggressive surveillance state can transform society.