Obama Publishes Legal Background To Surveillance – but much is still unclear
The Obama administration has provided its fullest description yet of why it believes it has the authority under the Patriot Act to collect in bulk the phone records of millions of Americans without suspicion of wrongdoing.
On Friday, as President Obama gave a press conference announcing his willingness to consider reforms to the National Security Agency's bulk-collection programs, his administration released two unclassified "white papers" that Obama hailed as steps at transparency. One was a legal analysis of the bulk phone records program; the other was a generic description of the NSA's foreign-directed surveillance activities.
Neither document provided much in the way of new information for the programs: a significant amount of the legal analysis about the bulk phone records program echoed congressional testimony by NSA and Justice Department officials, especially a lengthy July speech from Robert S Litt, the top lawyer in the intelligence community. Nor was either document a dispassionate recitation of facts: both presented the administration's case for why Americans should be "comfortable" – as Obama put it today – with bulk collection of their data.
Still, the documents shed light on controversial legal theories that are likely to be tested in court in the weeks and months ahead.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/obama-legal-background-surveillance-nsa
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