Feinstein 'totally opposed' to US spying on allies

Senate intelligence panel chief Dianne Feinstein says she's "totally opposed" to U.S. spying on allies, as lawmakers were to grill the top two U.S. spy heads. The California Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who promised a total review of all U.S. surveillance programs, also said she expected the Obama administration would end all spying on foreign allied leaders. "It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community," said Feinstein, an Obama ally and usually one of the National Security Agency's strongest Capitol Hill defenders. The last time U.S. intelligence operations were thoroughly reviewed by Congress was in 1975, when a Senate Intelligence Committee precursor, led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, probed intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA, NSA and FBI after alleged abuses of law and of power were revealed by the Watergate affair. Her promise of a total review came as National Intelligence Director James Clapper and NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander were to testify before the House Intelligence Committee at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. "Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers," Feinstein said in a statement. The president should be required to approve such monitoring, she added. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday the NSA ended eavesdropping on phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders after an Obama administration review, started this summer, revealed to the White House the existence of the operation. The report said it appeared U.S. spying on allied foreign leaders went on for years without Obama's knowledge. "It is my understanding that President Obama was not aware Chancellor Merkel's communications were being collected since 2002. That is a big problem," Feinstein said. Obama wouldn't say Monday when he first knew about the spying on allied leaders, but said he approved broad NSA intelligence-collection priorities. "We give them policy direction," he told Fusion, a new cable channel from ABC News and Univision. "But what we've seen over the last several years is their capacities continue to develop and expand, and that's why I'm initiating now a review to make sure that what they're able to do doesn't necessarily mean what they should be doing," he said. NSA spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the agency has "already made some decisions through this process and expect to make more as we continue." She wouldn't say what the decisions are, but said the review was expected to be completed by the end of the year. Clapper and Alexander were widely expected to be grilled by the House panel on why they appeared not to have informed either the White House or congressional oversight committees about the spying activities directed at foreign leaders. Clapper is under fire for lying to Feinstein's committee in March about bulk domestic data collection. Alexander said in a Pentagon "Armed With Science" video blog last week, "We ought to come up with a way of stopping" reporters from publishing stories about the NSA's bulk collection programs. Also Tuesday, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. -- who sponsored the 2001 Patriot Act, which the NSA and FBI cite to justify mass domestic phone surveillance -- was expected to introduce a bill called the USA Freedom Act that would ban warrantless bulk phone metadata collection and prevent the NSA from querying its foreign communications databases for identifying information about Americans. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was expected to introduce the bill's Senate counterpart measure around the same time.