NSA Reformers Score a Big Victory

[Valin]

The Feed:

12/19/13

 

Months of furor over the NSAs surveillance program have come to a head: a panel of advisors appointed by President Obama to make recommendations on reforming the NSA have released their report. The NYT has the details:

 

In backing a restructuring of the N.S.A.s program that is systematically collecting and storing logs of all Americans phone calls, the advisers went further than some of the agencys backers in Congress, who would make only cosmetic changes to it, but stopped short of calling for the program to be shut down, as its critics have urged. The N.S.A. uses the telephone data to search for links between people in an effort to identify hidden associates of terrorism suspects, but the report says it was not essential to preventing attacks. [...]

 

Under the new system proposed by the review group, such records would stay in private hands either scattered among the phone companies or pooled into some kind of private consortium. The N.S.A. would need to make the case to the surveillance court that it has met the standard of suspicion and get a judges order every time it wanted to perform such link analysis.

Overall, the recommendations call for tightening up oversight over the NSA without disposing of key programs necessary to US interests continue. Perhaps the most important reform that the report suggests is to create a public interest advocate who would represent the publics civil liberties at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. FISA is notoriously shadowy, and lacks the adversarial elements that the rest of our system contains. Establishing an office dedicated to opposing restrictions on privacy and civil liberties is a big step forward to making FISA better.

 

(Snip)