Analyst's note:  Under Obama: Massive Scale of NSA & FBI Surveillance: 'Under This Logic, They Can Do Anything!' 

Latest Obama scandal has even New York Times sounding like Tea Party

The author of the Patriot Act said Thursday that a secret program under which the Obama administration was collecting phone records from millions of Americans is "excessive" and beyond the scope of the law. 

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who wrote the 2001 law, was among a host of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who raised alarm over the practice. 
 

[....] The Obama administration found itself defending -- and beginning to explain -- yet another surveillance effort after leaked documents revealed information about two secret National Security Agency intelligence-gathering programs.

On top of a Guardian newspaper report that revealed how authorities were collecting phone records from millions, a Washington Post report detailed another program that scours major Internet companies including Google and Facebook for data. A former senior NSA official confirmed to Fox News that the program was started in 2007 by the FBI and NSA and allows them to tap into top U.S. Internet companies to pull audio, video and other data. 

While civil liberties groups cried foul over the program, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement late Thursday decrying the leak of the materials. He called the disclosure of the program that allows the NSA to collect communications data from Internet companies "reprehensible" and said the phone-records monitoring leak could cause harm to the nation's intelligence gathering activities.

At the same time, he took the rare step of moving to declassify information about the programs as he sought to defend them against criticism. [....]