WASHINGTON — The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that the panel would hold a hearing to get to the bottom of reports that the National Security Agency improperly tapped into the domestic communications of American citizens.
"We will make sure we get the facts," said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees learned of the problem in late February from the Justice Department, a congressional official said Thursday. The committees have since had multiple private briefings on the NSA transgressions.
The Justice Department confirmed Wednesday that it had reined in the NSA's wiretapping activities in the United States after learning that the agency had improperly accessed American phone calls and e-mails while eavesdropping on foreign communications.
Justice officials discovered the problems during a routine review of NSA wiretapping. The government's action was first divulged Wednesday by The New York Times.
The Senate hearing will be closed to the public and will delve into questions raised by The New York Times story that have not been covered in closed-door informal briefings, a committee official said. The official would not say what those issues are.
The House Intelligence Committee has already held four secret briefings on the NSA action, said Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Tx. The House Judiciary Committee was also notified.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the NSA program is classified.
Department officials said the problems have been corrected, but they declined to say what measures were taken. Justice officials would not detail how the law governing NSA wiretapping was violated or for how long. They also would not estimate how many Americans' communications were compromised.
Critics of the secret program _ the extent of which has never been revealed _ contend the government has illegally wiretapped and used data-mining techniques to sweep up vast amounts of phone and e-mail communications.
Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the revelation shows the "NSA surveillance program is not narrowly targeted against international terrorist communications as the government has claimed, but actually sweeps in masses of domestic information from telecommunications fiber optic networks."
Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security project, said the revelation shows that safeguards built into the current surveillance law do not necessarily work. The current law, which the ACLU had opposed, "set virtually no limits on the government's eavesdropping authority, but it appears that the NSA has disregarded even what minimal limits existed," Jaffer said.
The government's secret use of domestic eavesdropping has been a contentious issue since 2005, when it was revealed that for years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to intercept phone conversations and e-mails inside the United States without permission from a court created by law 30 years ago to oversee just such activities. The court was created to prevent the political abuse of government surveillance powers.
Congress changed the law last year, both loosening some provisions and tightening other in an effort to strike a balance between protecting national security and guarding civil liberties.
The law allows the government to obtain broad, yearlong intercept orders from the FISA court that target foreign groups and people inside the United States.
That provision raised the prospect that communications with innocent Americans might be inadvertently or purposely collected without their knowledge or consent. The court is supposed to approve how the government chooses its targets and how the intercepted American communications would be protected.
The original FISA law required the government to get wiretapping warrants for any individuals targeted from inside the United States.
But technology has changed. Purely foreign communications increasingly pass through U.S. wires and are contained on American computer servers, making them a valuable source of information for U.S. spy agencies.
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