Eight of those seats are reserved for one majority and one minority member of each of the following committees: Appropriations, Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Judiciary.

[8] In 2013, and beyond, the SSCI received renewed attention in the wake of Edward Snowden's disclosures regarding the NSA surveillance of communications.

Senator Dianne Feinstein and the SSCI made several statements on the matter, one of which was notably disputed: that the NSA tracked US citizens' locations via cellphone.

[11] On April 21, 2020, the SSCI (chaired at the time by the Republican Richard Burr) released a much redacted report[12][13][14] with its final judgment that the intelligence community's assessment was "coherent and well-constructed"; the SSCI therefore supports the intelligence community's claim that Putin's "interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election" in favor of candidate Trump was unprecedented in its "manner and aggressiveness".

[15][16] In 2018, the SSCI Director of Security James Wolfe was arrested and convicted of lying to the FBI on the leak of classified documents to a reporter with whom he was in an affair.