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Updated Saturday, July 30, 2011 10:11 pm TWN, AP

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White House unsure on number of domestic surveillance subjects

WASHINGTON -- Like its predecessor, the Obama administration says it cannot count how many people in the United States have had their telephone calls and e-mails monitored by government agents in national security investigations under federal surveillance law.

The National Intelligence Director's office said in a letter this week to two Senate Democrats that it was “not reasonably possible to identify the number.”

The senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both Democrats like President Barack Obama, worry that the government may be monitoring communications of law-abiding citizens with inadequate justification.

“We're not asking these questions to embarrass the administration or make the intelligence community's job more difficult,” Wyden said in a statement Thursday. “Congress needs to know if the laws it writes are being interpreted and implemented as intended before it is asked to extend them, and failing to assure the public that government agencies aren't violating the rights of law-abiding Americans erodes public confidence and makes it harder for intelligence agencies to do their jobs.”

The letter from the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a response to the senators' requests for information about how the Obama administration is interpreting amendments affixed in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Wyden and Udall say they are concerned that the Obama administration may be engaging in expansive interpretations of the 2008 law, which is scheduled to expire in late 2012.

The 2008 FISA amendments allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders that target foreign groups and people overseas, raising the prospect that phone calls and emails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country will be swept in.

In saying it was unable to provide a number for those in the U.S. whose communications were collected, the administration's letter pointed Wyden and Udall to classified reports provided to Congress which give the number of circulated intelligence reports that refer to at least one person in the United States and give the number of collection targets later determined to be in the United States.

Wyden, however, said it was unacceptable that the administration was asserting it cannot give Congress “at least a ballpark estimate.”

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