Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are sounding cautious over work facing Congress in reforming NSA surveillance practices as proposed by President Barack Obama.
In a speech Friday, Obama said he is placing new limits on the way intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans -- and was moving toward eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government's hands.
Murphy says the president's goals are laudable, but it is hard to figure out how that can be done while retaining the ability of law enforcement to probe and collect information when necessary for a specific case.
Blumenthal says Obama's reform blueprint leaves a lot of work for Congress to work out details that will enable effective intelligence but prevent government overreach in collecting telephone data or other surveillance.
Blumenthal is a member of a bipartisan group of senators who announced plans in September for a bill to overhaul the secret federal surveillance court, allow constitutional challenges and create an advocate to argue against the government.
