NYT Op/Ed: "The President On Mass Surveillance"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/opinion/the-president-on-mass-surveillance.html

The President on Mass Surveillance

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
January 17, 2014

In the days after Edward Snowden revealed that the United States government was collecting vast amounts of Americans’ data — phone records and other personal information — in the name of national security, President Obama defended the data sweep and said the American people should feel comfortable with its collection. On Friday, after seven months of increasingly uncomfortable revelations and growing public outcry, Mr. Obama gave a speech that was in large part an admission that he had been wrong.

The president announced important new restrictions on the collection of information about ordinary Americans, including the requirement of court approval before telephone records can be searched. He called for greater oversight of the intelligence community and acknowledged that intrusive forms of technology posed a growing threat to civil liberties.

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But even as Mr. Obama spoke eloquently of the need to balance the nation’s security with personal privacy and civil liberties, many of his reforms were frustratingly short on specifics and vague on implementation.

The president’s most significant announcement was also the hardest to parse. He ordered “a transition that will end” the bulk collection of phone metadata as it currently exists, but what exactly will end? The database will still exist, even if he said he wants it held outside the government. Mr. Obama should have called for sharp reductions in the amount of data the government collects, or at least adopted his own review panel’s recommendation that telecommunications companies keep the data they create and let the National Security Agency request only what it needs. Instead, he gave the Justice Department and intelligence officials until late March to come up with alternate storage options, seeking a new answer when the best ones are already obvious.

But he added two restrictions that could significantly reduce the possibility of abuse of this information: Wherever the database resides, he said, it may be queried only “after a judicial finding or in the case of a true emergency.” (That calls for a clear definition of “emergency.”) Agency analysts will be permitted to pursue phone calls that are two “hops” removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization, instead of three. That extra hop allowed for the examination of an exponentially larger number of phone calls.

Mr. Obama did not address the bigger problem that the collection of all this data, no matter who ends up holding onto it, may not be making us any safer. That was the conclusion of the president’s review panel as well as a federal judge in Washington who ruled that the bulk-collection program was probably unconstitutional and an extensive report by the New America Foundation finding that the program “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity.”

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