US lawmakers demand to know how many residents are under surveillance

Two powerful U.S. lawmakers are pushing President Donald Trump administration's to tell them how many of the country's residents are under surveillance by the National Security Agency.

In a letter sent Friday, Representatives Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers Jr. asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to provide an estimate of the number of U.S. residents whose communications are swept up in NSA surveillance of foreign targets. Goodlatte, a Republican, is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Conyers is the committee's senior Democrat.

Committee members have been seeking an estimate of the surveillance numbers from the ODNI for a year now. Other lawmakers have been asking for the surveillance numbers since 2011, but ODNI has failed to provide them.

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