Curbing NSA surveillance

last updated 8 January 2015

The White House said this week it will propose a broad overhaul of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, ending the government’s mass collection of Americans’ call records. Under the plan, records detailing who called whom would remain in the hands of phone companies, and the NSA would need the permission of a judge to review the data for specific searches related to terrorism. A bill before the House Intelligence Committee proposes similar fixes, but would allow the NSA to access phone records prior to a judge’s approval. President Obama touted the reforms as a reasonable compromise that “allows us to do what is necessary to deal with the dangers of a terrorist attack” while protecting privacy.

Don’t believe it, said Trevor Timm in The Guardian (U.K.). Neither the White House plan nor the House bill stops other types of bulk collection, such as mass surveillance of Internet or financial data. These proposals also don’t force the NSA to give up the massive store of data it has already amassed, which no doubt includes information on “millions of innocent people.”

Still, Obama’s plan would “assure Americans that there was some sort of due process going on whenever their phone records are examined by the government,” said Peter Bergen in CNN.com. That brings us closer to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches.” And requiring the NSA to get judicial permission is a small price to pay, since a recent study of post-9/11 terror prosecutions in the U.S. showed that the phone-data program “had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”