Cato's Julian Sanchez Responds to Carrie Cordero

we seem to have at least 13 senators who don’t believe they’ve been provided with enough information to perform their oversight role adequately. Perhaps they’re setting the bar too high, but I find it more likely that their colleagues—who over time naturally grow to like and trust the intelligence officials upon whom they rely for their information—are a bit too easily satisfied. There are no  prizes for expending time, energy, and political capital on ferreting out civil liberties problems in covert intelligence programs, least of all in an election year. It’s far easier to be satisfied with whatever data the intelligence community deigns to dribble out—often with heroic indifference to statutory reporting deadlines—and take it on faith that everything’s running as smoothly as they say. That allows you to write, and even believe, that you’re conducting “robust” oversight without knowing (as Wyden’s letter suggests the committee members do not) roughly how many Americans are being captured in NSA’s database, how many purely-domestic communications have been intercepted,  whether warrantless “backdoor” targeting of Americans is being done via the selection of database queries. But the public need not be so easily satisfied, nor accept that meaningful “accountability” exists when all those extensive reports leave the overseers ignorant of so many basic facts.