The Obama administration has launched an internal review of the recent leak that has exposed a series of government surveillance programs. The White House says its probe will focus on potential damages to national security. The move was announced amidst new formal challenges to government spying and secrecy. A bipartisan group of senators has unveiled a measure that would declassify major decisions by courts operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, said: “Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law.” Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging the secret program collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo said the suit is being brought to stop dragnet surveillance on a massive scale.

Alex Abdo: “The very real aspiration of the NSA that we’ve now learned is to essentially record the Internet, to keep track of every time anyone says anything to anyone online, on the phone, through any kind of communication, and store it indefinitely in a government database in case at some point in the future it’s important. That’s not the role for government that our Constitution sets out. They have every tool they need to fight terrorism. They don’t need this one.”