For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrantless surveillance law that was intended to target foreigners overseas.
This past week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates as Congress weighs changes to a law that permits some of the National Security Agency's most sweeping espionage but would expire at the end of the year.
"The NSA has made Herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate," Dan Coats, a career Republican politician appointed by President Donald Trump as the top U.S. intelligence official, testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.