mr. vitka: to go into the fbi exemption, bob, i'm curious if you had thoughts on this. in your introduction, you said that transparency could be improved. it could be improved right now couldn't it? mr. litt: as i also said, there is a balance that has to be struck between transparency and impact on security. i think while -- and i am not an expert in the details of the transparency provisions -- but it is my understanding that some of the provisions were taken out and some of the existing provisions were strengthened. more detail was provided in more transparency in some areas. the fact is more you authorize release of information about specifically what we are doing the more you enable people to evade what we are doing and that is the balance that has to be struck in any kind of legislation like this. mr. vitka: i would think the most informative part there, for policy makers, would be the number of americans who are affected, and i do not mean the numbers who are targeted, that it would indi

mr. vitka: does this strike you as a problem. mr. schwarz: it was not a problem for us. as i read about it, the senators and congressmen are enormously busy and they are given a limited amount of time and they cannot have a staff person who often is more broadly knowledgeable, and that is a problem. my guess is the intelligence community ought to be able to decide if staff people are deserving of high-level clearances, and then they could get rid of this rule that seems to say to senators and representatives you got to do it all on your own and you got a limited time, but why can't they clear high-level staff people on the committee's or elsewhere in the congress? ms. eoyang: if i could say why it is important why members of congress are not left on their own, because your average member of congress comes from a walk of life where they may not necessarily have expertise in the law or in technology. without someone else to explain to them how these programs work, they may not understand what the

mr. vitka: i want to highlight this was a reuters report, and it detailed and i will ask patrick to explain it and bob to comment, but to present the severe dissonance that exists in terms of what this is. nancy, described it as phoning up investigations and said she'd never heard it anything like it. and senior dea officials called it decades old, a bedrock concept. and nancy was a judge, by the way. patrick? mr. toomey: to describe what and some of the critical -- criminal cases we litigate, and articles described, and articles have expended on especially to the dea's program and recent disclosure of bulk collection of phone calls out of the u.s., parallel construction is an effort to construct a parallel source for certain evidence in investigations. it often occurs in certain senses. where we see it or wait believe it happened where investigators obtain information using one authority, which is potentially controversial or novel or legally untested in the court and they rely on that authori