AL.com - Rep. Mo Brooks Re-thinking Position on NSA Spy Program, Fears Privacy Intrusion on U.S. Citizens

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By Paul Gattis

The NSA spy program has served America well, saving perhaps as many as 10,000 lives by stopping terrorist attacks, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks said.

"They are helping with security," said Brooks, R-Huntsville.

The National Security Agency may also be overstepping boundaries when it comes to violating the personal privacy of the people it is protecting, Brooks said.

It's a conflict that Brooks said has caused him to re-consider his previous enthusiastic support for the NSA program, he said during a town hall meeting Monday night at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"My initial position, it's changing some as I get more information," Brooks said.

During a speech to the Huntsville Rotary Club in August, Brooks praised the NSA spy program - saying it had helped prevent 13 planned terrorist attacks on the U.S. and 54 worldwide since 2006.

As a member of both the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Brooks has access to classified documents on terrorist plots stopped by the NSA.

Brooks said he's seeking a middle ground to balance the productive work of the NSA program with intrusions on privacy. The Washington Post reported last week that the NSA had obtained information by infiltrating Google and Yahoo data centers.

"The unfortunate side is, they are very active in areas that cause privacy concerns," he said. "The more I discern about this activity, the more I want to restrain them and I'm looking for ways to restrain them while at the same time, still enable them to protect American citizens from successful terrorist attacks."

It's inevitable, Brooks said, that a terrorist plot will slip through the intelligence cracks. And if the NSA can minimize that risk, it shouldn't be discarded.

"The kind of stuff we've seen worries me but it doesn't scare the woolies out of me," Brooks said. "The kinds of attacks I have seen by and large have been with conventional weaponry of some kind or another. It might be the use of an airplane or a train - something of that nature.

"What concerns me is we might miss - and we're not perfect, we're going to miss some of these terrorist attacks - if we hamstring the NSA, we might miss the use of weapons of mass destruction. I'm talking about where they take out one or more American cities with nuclear devices, biological devices, chemical devices."

Brooks continued, saying, "That's my big concern and that's what we have to weigh. And I'm open to suggestions to how to best weigh that."

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