Hours after Sanders sent his letter on Friday, the office of the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) Court had renewed the domestic phone records collection order for another 90 days.
Soon after Sanders' letter was published, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) Court, the body which exists to provide government oversight of NSA surveillance activities, had renewed the domestic phone records collection order for another 90 days.
While the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, in July declassified a Fisa court order underpinning the bulk phone records collection, the order declassified on Tuesday delved far deeper into the reasoning used by the court to justify the mass collection under Section 215, allowing the government to access data "relevant" to an "ongoing" terrorism investigation.
On Friday morning, hours before the expiration of the phone-records bulk collection order, the top lawyer for the director of national intelligence, Robert S Litt, is scheduled to speak at the Brookings Institution in Washington about the controversial surveillance and the laws bounding it.
Beyond the question of the phone records collection, the court order authorizing it is a state secret.
But Obama accepted the intelligence community's highly contested rationale that bulk phone records collection was necessary in order for the government to detect domestic connections to terrorism.
These results are consistent with a CBS News poll, Fox News poll, and YouGov survey that showed only 38%, 32%, and 35% of Americans respectively approved of phone record collection in order to reduce the chance of a terrorist attack.
On Friday, the Obama administration and the intelligence agencies will face the expiration of a Fisa court order for bulk domestic phone records collection.
It has also ordered more disclosure from the government about its own surveillance rulings, and publicly stated that Snowden's leaks have "engendered considerable public interest and debate," particularly over the bulk phone records collection.
But God willing, next year we'll have got the money and I'll have got my record collection back in order.
