The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked
President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of
American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal
and ought to be shut down.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an
independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch,
issued a report on Thursday that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US
phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute
cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The recommendations of the five-member board, which were not
unanimous, amount to the strongest criticism within the US government yet of
the highly controversial surveillance program, first disclosed by the Guardian
thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden. They give fresh support to
congressional efforts at ending the practice on Capitol Hill – the main
political battleground where the scope of surveillance will be readjusted this
year.
According to the report, first published by the Washington
Post and the New York Times, the privacy board found that the mass phone data
collection was at best marginally useful for US counter-terrorism, a finding
that went further than similar assessments by a federal judge and Obama’s own
surveillance advisory board.
Not only did the PCLOB conclude that the bulk surveillance
was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance”
in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism
investigation”.
“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program
directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or
the disruption of a terrorist attack.”
The PCLOB tacitly rejected the NSA’s public claim that the
bulk phone records collection may have made the difference in stopping a
terrorist plot connected to cab drivers in San Diego – a rare case in which a
government review body has specifically refuted the NSA’s aggressive post-Snowden
PR campaign.
“We believe that in only one instance over the past seven
years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown
terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in planning
a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have
discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program,” it found.
Obama endorsed moving the bulk phone records collection out
of the NSA’s hands and into those of a private entity, whose contours he left
undefined in his Friday speech, his most extensive remarks on the surveillance
to date.
But Obama accepted the intelligence community’s highly
contested rationale that bulk phone records collection was necessary in order
for the government to detect domestic connections to terrorism. “I believe it
is important that the capability that this program is designed to meet is
preserved,” Obama said.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said
Thursday that the White House disagreed with the PCLOB’s assessment of the
program’s legality.
“Consistent with the recent holdings of the United States
district courts for the southern district of New York and southern district of
California, as well as the findings of 15 judges of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court on 36 separate occasions over the past seven years, the
administration believes that the program is lawful. As the president has said
though, he believes we can and should make changes in the program that will
give the American people greater confidence in it,” Hayden said.
The privacy board, which briefed Obama on its findings
before his speech last week, recommends instead that the bulk collection ought
to be ended outright, owing to its assessed lack of necessity and dubious legality.
Under the privacy board's recommendation, federal agencies
would be able to obtain phone and other records under court orders in cases
containing an individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. But there would be no
storehouse, private or public, of telephone data beyond what the phone
companies keep in the course of their normal business activities.
That recommendation, which goes further than the one issued
by Obama’s surveillance advisory board, bolsters a bipartisan bill in the House
and Senate, called the USA Freedom Act, which aims to decisively end bulk
domestic data collection.
But the privacy board assessment drew its own rebuke from
Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, a former FBI agent and chairman of the
House intelligence committee.
“I am disappointed that three members of the board decided
to step well beyond their policy and oversight role and conducted a legal
review of a program that has been thoroughly reviewed,” Rogers said in a
pre-dawn statement that castigated the PCLOB for going “outside its expertise”
in criticizing the utility of the bulk phone data collection.
Read more at: Theguardian
No comments:
Post a Comment