Rep. John Garamendi on Friday expressed alarm about revelations about the extent of government surveillance of phone calls and Internet use, saying most members of Congress had been left in the dark.

“I don’t know that anybody in Congress or maybe in the administration, perhaps even the president himself, knew the extent of this collection of information, and I’m very deeply concerned about it,” said Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove.

President Barack Obama said earlier Friday that the programs had helped avert terrorist attacks and are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government and they do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens and U.S. residents.”

Obama said that, “when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.” Others who have defended the programs, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., also have said that members of Congress have knowledge of the programs.

“No, we don’t. No, we don’t,” Garamendi said. “There may be some that know and perhaps Senator Feinstein knows; as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee this is her domain. But I can tell you that of the 435 members of Congress, I’ll bet you cannot find more than two that know the details — and I’m not even sure you can find two.”

Feinstein told MSNBC on Thursday that “before the last two renewals, both the vice chairman of Intelligence Committee and myself sent a letter to every member of the Senate, saying this was the case.” The director of National Intelligence has said both the judiciary and intelligence committees are “regularly briefed.”

Garamendi later said it was possible the ranking members of the intelligence committees were aware of the programs, but not the congressional rank and file.

“When the Patriot Act was up for renewal, there was zero information available to us as to the PRISM program. Who knows what other programs are out there?” he said. “Maybe the chairpersons and the ranking members of the intelligence committees knew, but I can assure you that they weren’t sharing it with us.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting Verizon’s domestic and international call log data.

A day later, The Washington Post and The Guardian revealed top-secret documents showing that the NSA obtains information that includes email, photos, video, live chats, logins and file transfers from nine Internet companies, Apple, Google and Microsoft among them. In doing so, the NSA makes use of a computer system code-named PRISM.

Also on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA also collected phone records from AT&T and Sprint Nextel, credit card information and web searches and other information from Internet service providers.

“There’s new information coming out (in the press) every hour,” Garamendi said. “As a member of Congress, I want to know what’s going on, what is this all about, why is it necessary, how extensive is it. Why are we collecting this information and what are we doing with it? Is it going into a massive database to be used for what purpose, where?

“These are all questions that I don’t have an answer for, and what I am hearing from the security agencies is either they don’t know or they’re not talking. I believe Congress has to investigate, ask the tough questions and, as much as possible, let the American people know what’s going on here and why.”

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the FBI a blanket order compelling Verizon to turn over “metadata,” including the time and length of calls, phone numbers of those participating and location. Feinstein has said that such three-month renewals have been made for about seven years under the Patriot Act.

In 2011, Garamendi voted against the renewal of the Patriot Act.  “I had a gut feeling about the Patriot Act, that it went too far,” he said on Friday.

A year later, Garamendi opted to vote for a five-year renewal of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act. “It was my understanding that dealt specifically with international calls,” he said.

In fact, it’s that law that provides the legal basis for the NSA’s data collection. It can obtain a secret court order to conduct blanket, warrantless surveillance — even if the data is collected domestically — so long as it aims to gather intelligence on foreign targets “reasonably believed” to be outside of the country.

The law also gives immunity to companies that cooperate in intelligence collection.

“We rely on the members of those committees to share with us their understanding of the bills,” Garamendi said. “I’ve told you what I understood the bill to be. It may very well be that there was more there.

“Much of the legislation is not readily available. If it is available, you have to view the legislation in a secure, top-secret location. Most bills are written in such a way that you have to know the total law before you understand the implications of the bill. That makes it very, very difficult. They don’t make it available — at least certainly not on the floor and not in public.”

– Reach Cory Golden at [email protected] or 530-747-8046. Follow him on Twitter at @cory_golden

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