The office of outgoing National Intelligence Director James Clapper received the letter from a bipartisan group of 11 congressional lawmakers on Friday, and congressional staff has been briefed on how agencies should comply with disclosure requests by the National Security Agency.
Clapper told reporters in April that producing an estimate would be all but impossible, "If we could have made such an estimate, and if such an estimate were easy to do — explainable without compromise — we would’ve done it a long time ago," according to NPR. The intelligence chief added that Section 702 "is a prolific producer of critical intelligence to this country and our friends and allies."
The 11 legislators drafting the letter are members of the US House Judiciary Committee, seeking to "memorialize our understanding" of the agency’s plan to, by next month, provide the estimate in numbers, instead of percentages, so that the findings can be released to the public.
The letter stated that, "The timely production of this information is incredibly important to informed debate on Section 702 in the next Congress and, without it, even those of us inclined to support reauthorization would have reason for concern."
Signees include Democrats Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, John Conyers, Ted Deutch, Hank Johnson, David Cicilline, and Suzan DelBene as well as Republicans Darrell Issa, Ted Poe, Jason Chaffetz, and James Sensenbrenner.
Section 702, which deals with surveillance authority, is set to expire on December 31, 2017, if it is not reauthorized or reformed. The section empowers Upstream and Prism, two internet-surveillance programs that collect information from electronic correspondence. Whistleblower Edward Snowden first revealed these programs in his 2013 leak of classified information.
According to the ACLU, the law gives Prism the ability "to receive data directly from US companies like Google and Facebook and thereby collect the contents of foreign targets' emails, text and video chats, photographs, and more." Upstream is capable of collecting the content and metadata of electronic communications.
