The secret intelligence court that signs off on giving the U.S. government the authority to monitor hundreds of millions of telephone records has renewed the government’s request to do so for another three months.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Friday its authority to maintain the program expired on July 19 and that the government had sought and received a renewal from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper announced the new order.

“These programs are controversial, we understand that,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “But they are also very important… If we did not have these programs, then we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys.”
And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued on CNN’s “Statue of the Union” that by shedding light on the weekend terror threat, that “the NSA program is proving its worth yet again.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/315435-terror-threat-opens-new-front-in-nsa-debate#ixzz2b4CFxH6G

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy.

FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning document for 2013-17 describes the bureau as monitoring 95 percent of all mortgage transactions.

FHFA officials claim the database is essential to conducting a monthly mortgage survey required by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and to help it prepare an annual report for Congress.

Critics, however, question the need for such a “vast database” for simple reporting purposes.