It’s the holiday/Christmas season, other stuff is going on in Washington (the Defense appropriations bill, PATRIOT filibuster, etc.), and there was an intervening weekend, but a lot of people managed to get their opinions on the NSA spying allegations out there pretty fast. Thankfully, Sen. Ron Wyden — Oregon’s only member of Congress on an intelligence oversight committee so far as I can tell — has finally gotten into the fray (from The New York Times, 21 December):
A bipartisan group of senators – Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, both Republicans, and Dianne Feinstein of California, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon, all Democrats – called this week for the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels to open a joint investigation of the matter.
The letter (available from Feinstein’s site but not yet on Wyden’s) expresses “profound concern” and asks for “immediate inquiry and action,” but does nothing more than that. It’ll be interesting to see whether Wyden, like Feinstein, is more critical of what seems to have been going on.
Oddly enough, when I called Wyden’s Washington office late in the day the letter was dated, they told me there was no press release on the matter.