The NSA's denial of domestic surveillance has always been amusing, but the agency recently took it to new laughable levels by swearing before Congress that they even have the ability to spy on domestic e-mail or SMS. The NSA has been dodging increasing questions by Congress about their domestic surveillance activities, and their latest excuse for being unable to come clean on their activities is that informing Americans they're being spied on would violate their privacy rights.

From an NSA response to Senators Wyden and Udall, both on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who asked the agency to calculate just how many American citizens they spy on:So according to the NSA, they not only lack the capability to spy on Americans, they lack the ability to calculate how many Americans they spy on. Even if they could calculate those numbers, they refuse to do so because it would somehow violate citizen privacy rights. The reality of course is that the NSA has systems in place that have been spying on everyone for years (pdf) -- so they're never going to come clean because it would illustrate their total disregard for the law.

It's interesting that Wyden and Udall realize Congress has little real power or oversight into our own intelligence agencies, but it appears they're not making much progress in getting the NSA to acknowledge much of anything. If anything, it just seems like the NSA is mocking them with ever-increasingly obnoxious commentary as if to illustrate how little power Congress actually has.