The U.S. government's sweeping surveillance programs have disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and abroad, including a plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, senior Obama administration officials testified Tuesday.
The officials, appearing before a largely friendly House committee, defended the collection of telephone and Internet data by the National Security Agency as central to protecting the United States and its allies against terrorist attacks. And they said that recent disclosures about the surveillance operations have caused serious damage.
"We are now faced with a situation that, because this information has been made public, we run the risk of losing these collection capabilities," said Robert Litt, general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We're not going to know for many months whether these leaks in fact have caused us to lose these capabilities, but if they do have that effect, there is no doubt that they will cause our national security to be affected."