Review panel calls for prohibiting NSA bulk collection of phone metadata
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that after meeting the report’s authors on Wednesday, the president would be taking a copy with him to read over Christmas and would decide which recommendations to accept before delivering his state of the union address on 28 January.
“It’s an extremely dense and substantive exercise, which is why, in response to a 300-plus page report with 46 recommendations, we are not going to come out with an assessment five minutes later,” said Carney.
Carney acknowledged there was “no question” that the Snowden disclosures had helped lead to the review process and “heightened focus here at the White House and more broadly in the administration, around the United States and the globe.”
The Guardian notes that it remains to be seen whether the report and its recommendations will satisfy the lawmakers behind the USA Freedom Act, the major legislative vehicle before the House and Senate to end NSA domestic bulk call data collection. At least one member of the House intelligence committee who has sided with the reformers, Representative Adam Schiff (D-California), called it a “very positive step” and urged Obama to get out in front of the coming swell of legislation.
“With the strong likelihood of congressional action, as well as a recent adverse decision by a federal district court judge, I believe the president would be well served to take the advice of the board and restructure the program as soon as possible. It would be better to have this undertaken in an orderly and expeditious fashion, than to wait for it to be compelled by the Congress or the courts,” Schiff said on Wednesday.
Obama will wait until well into January to decide which of the panel’s forty-six recommendations to accept, but last week he decided to reject one of the recommendations by deciding against splitting the NSA from the U.S. military’s Cyber Command.
The White House explained that the decision was made because Cyber Command’s task of protecting U.S. military networks from hostile attack and launching wartime online counter-attacks is too ambitious for Cyber Command, which became operational only three years ago.
The NSA director will thus remain a military general or admiral, rather than a civilian, as the panel recommended.
The report’s authors were Richard Clarke, a former U.S. cybersecurity adviser; Michael Morell, a former deputy CIA director; Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor; Peter Swire, who served earlier on Obama’s national economic council; and Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law school professor who is married to UN ambassador Samantha Power.
A different group advising the president, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which has held public hearings into the NSA for months, on Wednesday announced it will release two studies of its own, one into bulk collection of domestic phone data and the other into bulk foreign communications collection.
The reviews, due in six to eight weeks, will also assess the operations of the secret FISA court overseeing surveillance and provide “recommendations for legislative and program changes,” the board announced.
