As we reported last week, Tampa area Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor surprised some of her constituents when she voted with Bill Young and Gus Bilirakis (among others) in opposing an amendment that would have cut funding for the NSA program that collects phone data.
As reported by Foreign Policy, a number of House Democrats opposed the amendment (offered by Michigan Republican Justin Amash) because of lobbying by their leader, Nancy Pelosi.
However, Pelosi did pen a letter to President Obama on Friday (see below) that Castor signed onto that calls on Congress to examine the various national security collection programs and consider amendments to the law.
Meanwhile, on ABC's This Week Glenn Greenwald — the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs — claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.
This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2013.