Obama Proposes End to Bulk Telephone Data Collection
Nearly 10 months after Edward Snowden and Guardian reporters exposed the NSA's telephone spying program, President Obama on Thursday said he would pursue legislation that would require the agency to seek customer records from phone companies on an individual basis via a still-secret court process.
Nearly 10 months after Edward Snowden and Guardian reporters exposed the NSA’s telephone spying program, President Obama on Thursday said he would pursue legislation that would require the agency to seek customer records from phone companies on an individual basis via a still-secret court process.
The proposal appears to leave the rest of the agency’s domestic surveillance program — of emails and other online activity — intact.
“I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold [telephone] data in bulk,” Obama said in a statement. “Instead, the data should remain at the telephone companies for the length of time it currently does today.”
The Guardian reports:
The move goes further than Obama’s position on bulk surveillance in January, when the president left the door open to the possibility of the data being held by a private-sector third party. That position was vigorously opposed by the phone companies and criticised by proponents and critics of the NSA alike.
Bulk phone data would no longer be collected by NSA under the latest proposals. Instead phone companies would, in response to a court order, turn over a suspicious phone number as well as all the numbers it called and received, and all numbers those numbers called and received, on an “ongoing and prospective basis”, according to an administration official.
The administration has yet to decide on a specific time limitation for querying the data, but “there would be some limited time period,” the official told reporters on Thursday. “That’s something we’re going to have to talk with Congress about.”
Read more here.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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The news proves "the failure of US government reforms to curb NSA's tendency to try and indiscriminately vacuum up the world's data," say rights groups government reforms to curb NSA's tendency to try and indiscriminately vacuum up the world's data," says one rights authority.
The Obama administration asked a federal court to resume the NSA surveillance programs ended by the expiration of parts of the Patriot Act on June 1.
Legislative critics of the USA Freedom Act, which was celebrated by privacy advocates as it passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday, say the law will merely adjust and codify the government’s practice of bulk telephone data collection, rather than end it.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday gave Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a big reason to crank up his hustle if he wants to hang on to the part of the Patriot Act that allows for the bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
The efforts to reform the way the U.S. government gathers intelligence indicate that the whistleblower's disclosures "have had the impact that motivated him,” writes Ronald Goldfarb, who served in the Justice Department of the Kennedy administration, at Time magazine.
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