Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein says she's open to holding public hearings on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. 
 
 Several senators – both defenders and critics of the NSA’s data-mining programs – have called for more public debate since the disclosures of those methods this week. 
 
 “I'm open to doing a hearing every month if that's necessary,” Feinstein said on ABC’s “This Week.” 
 
 The California Democrat held a classified session on the program on Capitol Hill last Thursday, which was attended by 27 senators. And she has defended the NSA program, saying it has helped thwart terrorist attacks. 
 
 Still, she acknowledged it was difficult for authorities to detail to the public how those methods have been helpful because of the classified nature of the information. 
 
 “We can't actually go in there and - other than the two that have been released - give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing,” Feinstein said. 
 
 On the show, Feinstein referenced two terrorist plots where the NSA programs have been used: the case of David Headley, who was eventually sentenced for his involvement in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, and Najibullah Zazi, who had planned an attack on the New York subway system in 2009. 
 
 Read more about: Dianne Feinstein, Surveillance, National Security Agency ||||| WASHINGTON — In mid-February, Senator John McCain went on the NBC program “Meet the Press” to explain his unhappiness with President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary. A week later, he took to “State of the Union” on CNN to chat about sequestration (bad) and the attack in Benghazi (worse). 
 
 In May, he was on “Fox News Sunday,” talking about Middle East politics with Chris Wallace. Last week, Mr. McCain, who was in California for his oldest son’s wedding, hit “Face the Nation” on CBS, via satellite, to discuss his trip to Syria. 
 
 Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, is not his party’s most recent presidential nominee. He is no longer the highest-ranking Republican on any major Congressional committee. And as party spokesmen go, these days he is just as often speaking against Congressional Republicans as with them. 
 
 Yet on many given Sundays — over 60 of them since 2010 — Mr. McCain repairs to a television studio in Washington to hold forth. On “Face the Nation” alone, Mr. McCain has appeared more than any other politician in the program’s 60-year history. 
 
 His Sunday ubiquity has set off some grumbling in Washington that producers give him too much airtime. It also tends to solidify the impression in living rooms across America that he remains the spokesman for, and titular head of, his party. 
 
 “Really?” Mr. McCain said with a soupçon of glee when informed of his record-breaking Sunday showiness. “Well I enjoy them. I find it is the best way to communicate with the American people.” 
 
 In many ways, the Sunday morning talk shows are like ID lanyards and BlackBerries. While much of the nation has lost interest in them, they hold a big — some would say disproportionate — sway in Washington. 
 
 The programs’ producers and members of Congress — and, to some degree, White House officials — collaborate in a weekly seduction ritual in which producers try mightily to get the most powerful guests and newsmakers of the moment, as the guests’ staffs weigh the risks of stepping before some of the toughest questioners in Washington. 
 
 When it comes to a dream guest, program hosts say, Mr. McCain checks almost every box: a senior Republican senator who can speak authoritatively and contemporaneously on many issues, flies secretly to Syria, compares members of his own party to deranged fowl and yet is a reliable opponent of most Obama administration policies. 
 
 “What makes a good guest is someone who makes news,” said Mr. Wallace, the Fox host. “To make news, you have to be at the center of the news and willing to talk about it in a noncanned way, someone who always come to the shows ready to play.” 
 
 He went on: “I sometimes think to myself, ‘Gee we’ve had McCain on a lot,’ ” not to mention Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. “But the fact of the matter is they are good guests.” 
 
 And good guests become frequent guests. The programs tend to be dominated by a handful of predictably quotable politicians. Others make only rare appearances when a pet issue rears its head. And still others, by choice or by elimination, never make the cut at all. 
 
 “I usually go where I’m asked,” said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, who has not been on a Sunday talk show in the last few years. “I did Greta the other night,” Mr. Isakson pointed out, referring to the Fox News program “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren.” 
 
 Mr. Isakson, like several other Republicans, says Mr. McCain does not serve as a spokesman for them or their party. “We all speak for ourselves,” he said. 
 
 Critics of the Sunday programs argue that the words spoken on them are at once too calculated and overly interpreted, simply by virtue of where they are delivered. “You can go on Charlie Rose midweek and have a long conversation that ends in a game of strip poker and no one will pay attention,” said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “You go on a Sunday show, and everyone is looking for the slightest change, a new syllable, some new nuance.” 
 
 The prominence of guests with strong points of view can give viewers a false sense of proportion to certain sides of policy debates. This is most clearly the case with Mr. McCain, whose advocacy for military intervention in Syria and criticism of the administration’s policies there might create a sense that there is a robust policy debate over the matter in Washington when there really is not. 
 
 “In order to deal with complexity but also create a basis for entertainment,” said Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center, “you need someone who knows what they are talking about who is pursuing daylight between themselves and the administration.” 
 
 Many guests believe that the talk shows also contribute to the partisan disharmony in Washington, though that may be like blaming a speck of pepper for the flavor of a 10-gallon pot of soup. Even the highest-rated programs attract fewer than 2.5 million viewers, a tiny audience by the standards of network television. 
 
 “There is a tendency on the Sunday shows to look more toward partisan polarization,” said David Gergen, a senior analyst for CNN who has advised four presidents. “They seek out people who are further out on the spectrum,” Mr. Gergen said, adding that “more than one senator” has told him the story of being bumped for a more partisan guest when they expressed moderate positions on issues in pre-interviews, something producers and hosts say is untrue. 
 
 “We aren’t looking for someone because of their ideological view,” said Bob Schieffer, the chief Washington correspondent for CBS and the moderator of “Face the Nation.” “We are trying to move the story forward.” 
 
 Many Congressional staff members, when faced with the weekly talk show requests, apply the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. One misstatement or shading can hurt a campaign and damage a career, as Susan E. Rice, who is the United States ambassador to the United Nations and is about to become Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, learned when she went on a series of shows one Sunday last September to discuss the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. 
 
 The term “talking points” will now follow her into retirement. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton avoided the Sunday talk shows for most of her short Senate career and wisely avoided the cameras after the Benghazi episode; Mr. Obama also stayed away when he was a senator, recalled Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the National Security Council, until Hurricane Katrina. 
 
 “That was around an event and a message,” Mr. Vietor said. “It made sense to do it. To go on as a lawmaker and play pundit minimizes you as a lawmaker.” 
 
 Some of the hosts complain that the White House sends out far too few high-level officials, a contention underscored by Mr. Schieffer’s thinly veiled contempt for the White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer when he appeared on a recent Sunday to address a variety of scandals that have bedeviled the administration. 
 
 “They tend to send out people who don’t seem to have direct knowledge of the story,” Mr. Schieffer said, noting that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was a frequent guest when he was a senator but rarely appeared now. Mr. Schieffer added that Mrs. Clinton would have been preferable to Ms. Rice after the Benghazi attack. 
 
 Despite their low ratings, the Sunday talk shows make headlines, and they are closely watched by Washington power brokers. Even the programs’ critics concede that they are a rite of power passage for politicians making their way to the top. 
 
 They can also be entertaining. Mr. Wallace remembered asking former President Bill Clinton a question that sent him into a paroxysm of rage. “My first thought was, ‘How am I go to handle this?’ ” he said. “Second, I thought, ‘This is great television.’ ” 
 
 Finally, because Mr. Clinton carried on at such length, Mr. Wallace thought of the South Carolina senator waiting in the wings. “We had to call and bump Lindsey,” he said. ||||| Sen. John McCain on Sunday defended the wide-reaching government surveillance programs revealed last week, arguing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system gives them “appropriate.” 
 
 Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union,” whether he was bothered by the programs, the Arizona Republican replied: “No, not really.” 
 
 “I believe that the FISA court system is an appropriate way of reviewing these policies,” said McCain, a top defense hawk on Capitol Hill. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Guardian reporter talks about NSA reporting) 
 
 “To somehow think that because we are having phone calls recorded as far as their length and who they were talking to, I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong if they want to go further and they have to go to this court,” McCain added. 
 
 The phone-records program has its defenders in Congress, with top intelligence leaders arguing that those methods helped prevent potential terrorist attacks. But civil libertarians such as Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have criticized the initiatives for reaching too far into Americans’ privacy. 
 
 Read more about: John McCain, Surveillance, National Security Agency ||||| 'I would be more than happy to speak to them,' he says on law enforcement. | POLITICO Screen grab 
 
 Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald said in an interview Sunday that he has not heard from law enforcement authorities about his reporting into the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics. 
 
 “Any time they would like to speak to me, I would be more than happy to speak to them,” Greenwald said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution and the very First Amendment of which guarantees a free press.” 
 
 Greenwald reported last week that under a government order, Verizon has turned over millions of phone records to the NSA as part of a vast data-mining program. A follow-up article from Greenwald reported that the government collected 97 billion pieces of data in March. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reporters say there's a chill in the air) 
 
 He also shed some insight into the motivations of his sources. 
 
 “They risked their careers and their lives and their liberty because what they were seeing being done in secret inside the United States government is so alarming and so pernicious that they simply want one thing,” Greenwald said. “That is, for the American people at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, and what the capabilities are, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.” 
 
 Greenwald pushed back against comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who called the disclosures of the surveillance programs “reckless.” 
 
 “The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus about any accountability who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing,” Greenwald said. “There is no national security harm from letting people know that they are collecting all phone records, that they are tapping into the Internet, that they are planning massive cyberattacks -- both foreign and even domestic.” 
 
 Read more about: Constitution, National Security Agency, James Clapper, Glenn Greenwald ||||| House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Sunday that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the story of the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods, ‘doesn't have a clue’ on how the program works. 
 
 Rogers, a Michigan Republican, warned of security risks that could come with the disclosures of the programs and argued that Greenwald’s source should be prosecuted if identified. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) agreed Greenwald’s source should face prosecution. 
 
 “He doesn't have a clue how this thing works,” Rogers said on ABC’s “This Week” of Greenwald. “Neither did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reporters say there's a chill in the air) 
 
 Rogers said the disclosures were harmful because Greenwald’s source did not have all of the information to depict an accurate portrayal of the NSA’s data-mining program. If the sources were legitimately concerned, Rogers said they should have come to authorities on Capitol Hill instead of the media. 
 
 “Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us,” Rogers said. “It's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took.” 
 
 Read more about: Dianne Feinstein, Surveillance, National Security Agency, Glenn Greenwald, Mike Rogers
– Glenn Greenwald is resolutely standing by his story, telling ABC today that if the NSA comes calling, “I will tell them that there is this thing called the Constitution, and the very First Amendment of which guarantees a free press.” Of his sources, the Guardian reporter dismissed claims of recklessness, saying they "risked their careers because what (is) being done inside the United States government is so alarming and so pernicious that they simply want ... for the American people at least to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in.” Further, he says, as per Politico, “The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power." Elsewhere in NSA news on your Sunday dial: Rand Paul wants to sue: I'm going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level. I'm going to be asking the Internet providers and all of the phone companies; ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying, 'We don't want our phone records looked at' then maybe someone will wake up and things will change in Washington." Mike Rogers thinks Greenwald 'doesn't have a clue:' “Neither did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous. Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us. It's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took.” Dianne Feinstein wants hearings: "I'm open to doing a hearing every month if that's necessary." But there's a but: "We can't actually go in there and - other than the two that have been released—give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing." John McCain thinks it's OK: “I believe that the FISA court system is an appropriate way of reviewing these policies. To somehow think that because we are having phone calls recorded as far as their length and who they were talking to, I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong if they want to go further and have to go to this court." Speaking of McCain, the New York Times ... has this piece on the faces you keep seeing on the Sunday shows over and over and over again.