Government officials have been arguing that information about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs has been served up in piecemeal, offering an incomplete and confusing picture at NSA's actions. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday that he is working to declassify more details about the NSA's surveillance apparatus to offer a more exhaustive view.
"We’d like to do it sooner rather than later, but I also think that we want to do this in such a way that we tell a complete story,” Holder told Bloomberg News. "You want to have something that will be understandable to people that have access to this information, something that is not piecemeal, but really is holistic."
New information about NSA's surveillance programs were revealed earlier this month by reports in The Guardian and The Washington Post based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden's provided new evidence the NSA collects broad swaths of telephone metadata and digital communications.
The NSA's data collection primarily targets non-Americans, but U.S. citizens' data can be collected and analyzed under a handful of government-set rules.
President Barack Obama, top intelligence community brass and several lawmakers have claimed that the NSA's programs are legal, strike an appropriate balance between privacy and security, and prevented 50 domestic terrorist attacks. Obama has also said he "welcomes a debate" about the program. Such a debate would be difficult to conduct, however; many specific details about the surveillance programs remain classified, a reality Holder seems to recognize.
"I think we can help clear up by declassifying things, so I think that’s what we’re intending to do," Holder told Bloomberg.
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