"Obama Panel Recommends New Limits on N.S.A. Spying"

[applegrove]

Obama Panel Recommends New Limits on N.S.A. Spying

By DAVID E. SANGER and CHARLIE SAVAGE at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/us/politics/report-on-nsa-surveillance-tactics.html?smid=re-share&_r=0

"SNIP.................................


Specifically the panel of five intelligence and legal experts recommended that Mr. Obama restructure a program in which the N.S.A. systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts. Instead, the panel said, the data should remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and a court order should be necessary each time analysts want to access the information of any individual “for queries and data mining.”

The experts briefed Mr. Obama on Wednesday on their 46 recommendations, and a senior administration official said Mr. Obama was “open to many” of the changes, though he has already rejected one that called for separate leaders for the N.S.A. and its Pentagon cousin, the United States Cyber Command.

If Mr. Obama adopts the majority of the recommendations, it would mark the first major restrictions on the unilateral powers that the N.S.A. has acquired since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They would require the agency to seek far more specific approvals from the courts, far more oversight from the Congress, and specific presidential approval for spying on national leaders, especially allies. The agency would also have to give up one of its most potent weapons in cyberconflicts: The ability to insert “back doors” in American hardware or software, or purchase previously unknown flaws in software that it can use to conduct cyberattacks.

“We have identified a series of reforms that are designed to safeguard the privacy and dignity of American citizens, and to promote public trust, while also allowing the intelligence community to do what must be done to respond to genuine threats,” says the report, which Mr. Obama commissioned in August in response to the mounting furor over revelations by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, of the agency’s surveillance practices.



................................SNIP"

[Coyotl]

1. kick

[DirkGently]

2. KNR

[winter is coming]

3. Collecting metadata on all phone calls is supposed to promote public trust?

[politichew]

4. They should poll the proposed reforms and implement the ones most popular.

Get out in front of this for 2014.

There will always be a vocal minority saying it didn't go far enough, but at least the polling won't reflect that.

[OnyxCollie]

5. Gee, Obama could have done something to limit the NSA in 2008.

I wonder why he waited until now.