SurveillanceReview panel calls for prohibiting NSA bulk collection of phone metadata
A 300-page report prepared for President Barack Obama made forty-six recommendations for better management of, and different guiding rules for, U.S. surveillance programs. Among the report’s recommendations: The NSA should be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the Internet and prohibited from collecting telephone records in bulk; spying on foreign leaders should require an authorization from a higher level then is currently the case; the government should be banned from undermining encryption. The president will announce by 28 January which of the forty-six recommendations he would accept.
A 300-page report prepared for President Barack Obama made forty-six recommendations for better management of, and different guiding rules for, U.S. surveillance programs. One of the recommendations is that the authority to grant permission to the NSA to eavesdrop on foreign leaders should reside higher in the administration than it currently does.
The recommendations by the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology are less sweeping than some have urged, and are yet to be approved by the president.
The Guardian reports that the White House was forced to release the report sooner than it had planned because of the pressure it was facing from America’s largest Internet companies. In a meeting with the president on Tuesday, these tech giants warned the president that a failure by the administration to take steps to shore up public confidence in communications privacy could seriously damage the U.S. economy.
The report recommends that the NSA should not be allowed to collect the metadata of Americans’ phone calls. The panel recommended that instead, private companies — phone carriers, Internet service providers – should retain their customer records in a format that the NSA can access on demand.
“In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” says the report. “The government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about U.S. persons for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.”
The report proposes only minimal changes to overseas surveillance, urging only that higher clearance to “identify both the uses and the limits of surveillance on foreign leaders and in foreign nations.”
The report is stronger on Internet encryption, stating that the U.S. government should not “undermine efforts to create encryption standards” and not “subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable” commercial security software.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the privacy advocates suing the Obama administration over the bulk surveillance, said it was disappointed with the review group report. “The review board floats a number of interesting reform proposals, and we’re especially happy to see them condemn the NSA’s attacks on encryption and other security systems people rely upon,” attorney Kurt Opsahl said.
“But we’re disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue untargeted spying. Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers.”
