The surveillance watchdog within the Department of Defense did not know about the sweeping National Security Agency (NSA) program that collected information about American phone calls, according to a Tuesday report from The Guardian.
The Defense Department’s Deputy Inspector General Anthony Thomas —who oversees NSA surveillance — told reporters that he was not aware of the controversial bulk surveillance program first made public last year, The Guardian reported.
“From my own personal knowledge, those programs, in and of themselves, I was not personally aware,” he said.
According to the report, Thomas also said his office is not currently investigating the NSA for its surveillance programs, instead deferring for now to the NSA’s Inspector General (IG).
“If the NSA IG is looking into something and we feel that their reporting, their investigation is ongoing, we’ll wait to see what they find or what they don’t find, and that may dictate something that we may do,” he said, adding that, when it comes to bulk surveillance, he is “waiting to see the information that the NSA IG brings forward with the investigations that are going on.”
The Guardian’s report on Tuesday follows a report from earlier in the day by The Washington Post about an NSA program that records 100 percent of an unnamed foreign country’s phone calls and stores them for one month. The Hill
AHT/ARA
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