None of Iowa’s four U.S. House members has issued a press release about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance of phone and online communications, but all have now made some public comment about the controversy. I enclose the details below.

Staff for Representative Bruce Braley (D, IA-01) sent me this statement in response to my request for comment:

“The disclosures over the past week raise many important questions about the federal government’s surveillance of Americans’ lives. In the weeks to come, I’ll be demanding more information on these programs and pushing to get answers to questions of whether they’ve gone too far. We know there’s a balance we must strike between security and privacy. I believe that keeping America safe and secure from its enemies must continue to be our highest priority, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the very values our nation so cherishes.”

Staff for Representative Dave Loebsack (D, IA-02) said he has nothing to add to comments published in this Des Moines Register report by Jennifer Jacobs.

“But those actions [to keep the country safe] must and can be balanced with robust protections for Americans’ privacy. That is why I am concerned about the breadth of this program,” he said in an email to the Register.

The Obama administration “must make the case to the American people about why this program is being used,” he said.

Representative Tom Latham (R, IA-03) never responds to my requests for comment, but he told the Des Moines Register that he has concerns about the NSA’s activities.

“The unanswered question is whether the programs have overstepped the bounds of what was intended by Congress, and whether we trust the government to wield this kind of capability to access such a vast amount of information on Americans without violating our rights,” he said in a statement to The Des Moines Register.

At the same time, Latham described the leaks by defense contractor employee Edward Snowden as “unacceptable.”

Staff for Representative Steve King (R, IA-04) did not send any additional comments beyond what King said during a June 12 appearance on Sean Hannity’s television show. Here’s my partial transcript.

King: You know, Sean, I don’t think I was astounded. I think that the breadth of this had already been released out into open source […] I really understood, I thought, the scope of what they [the NSA] delivered. But I wasn’t confident in the response that they gave, and also, the way they parsed their language and referenced particular sections of the code, it wasn’t clear to me where they were drawing their authority from and where they were hanging their hat. And I think that you could probably justify each component of all of this surveillance on its own, maybe constitution, maybe statutorily, maybe justify it as far as an intrusion into privacy. But when you put this whole picture together, it’s more than creepy. It’s beyond the imagination of George Orwell. […]

Think of a fishing expedition that has the capability, not necessarily utilizing it all, of tracking all phone records, not necessarily audio, but possibly. Also phone activity, the movement of it, the internet activity that’s there. Put that all together and then know that they also have a picture of both sides of the envelope of every snail mail. And look at an IRS that has a software package to search this and punish the [administration’s] political enemies. And look at a program that the Obama administration used politically to profile people by using open-source data, maybe not exclusively, and you’ve got a picture here that the American people are very concerned about, Sean.