Top US officials questioned over NSA surveillance programmes

The Obama administration's top officials are being questioned about the National Security Agency's surveillance programmes for the first time after the rejection of a proposal last week to effectively shut down the NSA's secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records.

The hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee today would include testimony from the No 2 officials at the justice department, FBI and NSA, as also the top lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Further, it would include testimony from James G Carr, a senior federal judge who earlier served on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and who recently urged Congress to give such judges more discretion and authority to appoint lawyers to serve the interests of the public.

According to Carr to do otherwise would put, ''basic constitutional protections at risk and creates doubts about the legitimacy of the court's work and the independence and integrity of its judges."

Last week, the government acknowledged in a letter to Congress that there had been an unspecified number of "compliance problems" in following the rules put in place governing the secret collection of Americans' phone records.

According to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, no intentional or bad-faith rules violations were found.

With the NSA surveillance becoming public two months ago, the chairman of the judiciary committee, senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat- Vermont, had introduced legislation that would allow the government to obtain phone records only when it could establish that the information was relevant to an authorised investigation and was linked to a foreign terrorist group or foreign power.

Meanwhile, on the senate floor late yesterday Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator for Oregon, and a member of the Senate intelligence committee, came close to accusing Clapper of lying.

Wyden cited classified documents that he did not specify but referred to "violations of court orders", saying these violations were more serious than those stated by the intelligence community, and more troubling. He called on senators to read classified intelligence documents about the bulk surveillance for themselves.

"Any policymaker who simply defers to intelligence officials without asking to see their evidence is making a mistake," Wyden warned.

Clapper had already apologised for untruthful testimony during a March senate colloquy with Wyden that the NSA did "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans.

"The violations I've touched on tonight are a lot more serious than [senators] have been told," Wyden said. "I'm going to keep pressing to make more of these details public."