WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration maintains it is unable to say how many times one of the government's most politically sensitive anti-terrorism surveillance programs — which is up for renewal this week on Capitol Hill — has inadvertently gathered intelligence about U.S. citizens.
But the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Tuesday on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that the program designed to monitor international communications by terrorist suspects has collected an extraordinary amount of valuable intelligence overseas about foreign terrorist suspects while simultaneously protecting civil liberties of Americans.
The program was created by the George W. Bush administration, disclosed by The New York Times in 2005 and restructured in 2008 to provide oversight by a secret federal court.
