WASHINGTON: America faces a new intelligence “gap” because an Al Qaeda affiliate has exploited information leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden so that the United States can no longer monitor the terrorists, Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said today.

“And, by the way, we have already seen one Al Qaeda affiliate has already changed the way it does business, so we have a gap,” Rogers told some 450 intelligence professionals and members of the media at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance’s (INSA) first conference here. “Candidly, the damage is growing by the day.”

Rogers told the audience that one intelligence agency is calling the hole caused by the change in the Al Qaeda affiliate’s behavior a “significant and irreversible” gap in America’s intelligence, Rogers said. After his remarks, the chairman declined to identify the regional Al Qaeda affiliate, saying he “had to be careful.”

The massive disclosure of data — leaked by Snowden, former Booz Allen intelligence contractor turned international fugitive, and extensively covered by the global press — “is costing us significantly in our ability to track our enemies,” Rogers added. Snowden’s leaks focus on many of the programs created after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks to improve America’s intelligence and eliminate the gaps famously detailed by the 911 Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. “Some of these programs that they talk about fill those gaps and — guess what — now have those gaps again.”

Rogers and his ranking member on HPSCI, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, defended the NSA activities.

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, ranking member of House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI)

“We are having public outcry about an agency that follows the law,” Rogers said, “[which] is costing us significantly in our ability to track our enemies.”. The oft-repeated analysis that NSA is violating American’s privacy rights and sometimes breaking the law “is completely wrong,” he told the receptive audience at the intelligence conference. “That is not what is happening. I can guarantee you that the privacy of Americans is not being compromised” by the National Security Agency, Rogers said.

Ruppersberger argued that no other country has more or better civil liberties protections: “We have more checks and balances than any other country.” In remarks he said he knew his staff would not like — “I’m going to say something that my staff is going to be upset about” — Ruppersberger called on the news media to, effectively, reexamine,its willingness to write about “sources and methods that will eventually cause deaths to Americans if we are attacked.”

In other remarks sure to spark controversy, Rogers appeared to want the NSA to monitor the phones of foreigners who come to the US from abroad if they’ve been targeted while overseas. Currently, the NSA has to turn off that monitoring until the FBI or others find probable cause to resume monitoring them.

“I’ve got bad news. I don’t think we ought to turn it off,” Rogers said. “We are working against ourselves.” We’ll have to see what the Justice Department and Attorney General might say about the legality of such practices.