Obama board defends NSA proposals

Members of the White House board suggesting reforms to the National Security Agency and other government surveillance efforts defended some of the spy agency’s most controversial activities on Tuesday.

Days before President Obama will announce which of the group’s recommendations he is endorsing, the five board members at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing said their proposals are designed to help the intelligence community and make spy agencies’ jobs easier.

{mosads}“Much of our focus has been on maintaining the ability of the intelligence community to do what it needs to do,” said Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who formerly served as the head of the White House’s regulatory office.

“Not one of the 46 recommendations in our report would in our view compromise or jeopardize that ability in any way,” he added.

“On the contrary, many of those recommendations would strengthen that ability explicitly by increasing safeguards against insider threats and by eliminating certain gaps in the law that make it hard to track people under circumstances that we have reason to believe don’t wish to do us will.”

A number of the review board’s recommendations call for new background check procedures to prevent leaks like the one from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The panels’ support of the intelligence agency’s effort extended to the collection of vast amounts of data about almost all people’s calls, which members of the board said was necessary to protect the country.

The review group’s report said that the bulk collection program “was not essential to preventing attacks.” Additionally, the public’s knowledge that the government “has ready access” to phone records “can significantly undermine public trust, which is exceedingly important to the well-being of a free and open society,” it noted.

But former CIA head Michael Morell, one of the report’s authors, told lawmakers on Tuesday that the fact that the program has not been essential to preventing attacks “is a different statement than saying the program is not important.”

Instead, the panel suggested that private phone companies or another third party be required to store the data. Government officials would then be able to search it with a court order.

The data collection program “only has to be successful once to be invaluable,” Morell said.

Obama is expected to embrace the majority of the review board’s suggestions in a speech at the Justice Department on Friday, but the fate of the bulk metadata collection is still under discussion, according to a source with knowledge of the White House’s plans.

Not all lawmakers have agreed with that review board’s proposal, though. That opposition was on full display at Tuesday’s hearing.

“I’ve concluded this phone record program is not uniquely valuable enough to justify a massive intrusion on Americans’ privacy,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). “It was not essential to preventing any terrorist attack.”

Along with Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), Leahy has introduced the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk metadata collection program.

Tuesday’s hearing was the first time all five members of the advisory board have appeared to discuss their recommendations for the president.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) added that the proposed reform to bulk records collection is “interesting” but said “I think it’s legitimate to have concerns that it may create as many privacy problems as it solves.”

“Indeed, private companies seem to be allowing their customers’ information to be hacked on what seems to be a daily basis,” he added, referring to recent data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus that occurred over the holiday shopping season. 

Privacy advocates and communications companies alike have shared the concerns that shifting responsibility for the records collection to an outside organization could threaten civil liberties and saddle businesses with a host of liabilities that they don’t want.

Ahead of Friday’s speech, Obama and top White House officials have met with lawmakers, tech company executives, leaders of the intelligence community and privacy and civil liberties advocates to hear their concerns and suggestions.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats are headed to the White House for what is expected to be a wide-ranging discussion about priorities for 2014. The president’s upcoming speech is expected to be a top item on the agenda.

Members of the White House review group said on Tuesday that they did not expect the full slate of recommendations to be adopted wholesale.

“No team bats 1.000 or even comes close,” said Sunstein.

The recommendations, he added, were “a mere part of the process.”