James Comey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
George Zornick | The Nation | July 11, 2013
If James Comey is confirmed to be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he will naturally find himself at the center of the rapidly evolving debate over government surveillance.
The FBI is often the organization making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which, as we’ve learned thanks to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, is authorizing all sorts of broad, and deeply troubling, surveillance. For instance, it was the FBI who made the now-infamous application to FISC mandating that Verizon turn over all of its telephonic metadata to the National Security Agency.
This means members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a serious obligation to press Comey on this issue—not least because, despite his bold stance against the very worst excesses of the Bush administration’s surveillance techniques, he still approved several other problematic surveillance programs.
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