GOP senator cites Clapper's testimony in March that US does 'not wittingly' collect data on American's communications
Spencer Ackerman in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 June 2013 18.39 EDT


The pressure on the Obama administration’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, increased Tuesday when a popular libertarian US senator said he had lied to Congress and suggested he consider [resigning] his position.

"The director of national intelligence, in March, did directly lie to Congress, which is against the law," said Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is considering a 2016 run for president, on CNN Tuesday.
...
Paul is one of the Senate’s leading civil libertarians. He led a futile 2011 fight to scale back the Patriot Act and famously spoke for 13 straight hours on the Senate floor in March to protest the Obama administration’s drone strikes on American citizens. After the Guardian published word of the phone-records collection this month, justified by the NSA under a section of the Patriot Act, Paul introduced a bill that would prevent the NSA from searching through Americans’ phone data without a warrant based on probable cause.

“That I have to keep reintroducing the fourth amendment – and that a majority of senators keep voting against it – is a good reflection of the arrogance that dominates Washington,” Paul wrote in a Guardian column on June 6.

Paul has another effort to check the NSA surveillance in the works, one that is not reliant on legislation. He is actively recruiting Verizon, Sprint and AT&T customers to join a class-action lawsuit against the carriers for delivering their data to the NSA. Paul claimed last week that he had 250,000 signatures for the lawsuit.

At a Tuesday hearing before the House intelligence committee, General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, repeatedly pointed out that the telecommunications companies and internet service providers are “compelled by the [Fisa] court” to cooperate with the NSA, a likely line of defense for the companies in a prospective class-action lawsuit.