Obama’s plan to rein in NSA surveillance

What happened

Hoping to calm growing public unease over high-tech government surveillance, President Obama last week unveiled plans to curtail the National Security Agency’s mass collection of domestic phone data and overseas spying operations. In one of the biggest changes, Obama said the government’s database of “metadata”—such as logs of phone calls received and sent, and the locations of callers—would no longer be stored in NSA computers. The Justice Department, intelligence officials, and Congress, he said, would now jointly decide where that data should be held. Then intelligence analysts would have to get approval from a secret court before querying that database. Obama also ordered the agency to stop eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly governments, a program that caused outrage in Brazil and Germany when it was exposed by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. These reforms, along with greater oversight of the NSA, should give Americans “greater confidence that their rights are being protected,” without damaging the agency’s ability “to keep us safe,” Obama said.

Congressional critics of NSA surveillance called Obama’s proposals nothing but a fig leaf, while defenders accused the president of trying to tie the agency’s hands. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said the president should flatly stop the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, calling the program a violation of the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches. Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Obama was injecting “lots of uncertainty” into the intelligence community’s efforts “to protect Americans by finding terrorists who are trying to reach into the United States.”

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What the editorials said

The president’s reforms are welcome, but “frustratingly short on specifics,” said The New York Times. Take his sensible-sounding proposal to take the phone records of every American out of the NSA’s hands. Obama should have followed his own intelligence review panel’s recommendation that phone companies hold the data, and that the NSA request only what it needs. Instead, he punted the decision to Congress, which is certain to bicker and dither over alternative storage options.

As usual, Obama is trying “to satisfy all sides” with empty rhetoric, said The Wall Street Journal. The president admitted that post-9/11 surveillance has “prevented multiple attacks” and that there was no evidence the NSA had violated any laws. So why tamper with programs that are keeping the country safe? The only possible reason is that he wants to appease the “paranoids and incendiaries” who make up the Democrats’ left wing.

What the columnists said

These proposals will cripple the NSA’s greatest asset, said John Yoo in NationalReview.com. At the moment, the government can quickly search the agency’s telephone database and “uncover links between a safe house in Yemen, for example, and potential terrorists abroad.” If agents have to wait for court approval for every search, they will lose track of terrorists who frequently switch phones and numbers to avoid detection.

Claims that metadata analysis has broken up terrorist plots “are overblown and even misleading,” said Peter Bergen in CNN.com. An analysis by the nonpartisan New America Foundation found that of 225 Islamic extremists charged with terrorism in the U.S. since 9/11, the bulk collection of telephone metadata played a role in, at most, only 1.8 percent of investigations. Even in these cases, the metadata was of marginal value; traditional policing techniques, such as the use of informants, led to the arrests. “Never have so many Americans been brought under surveillance for such a meager payoff,” said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. If we were sacrificing our privacy to save lives, that would be one thing. Giving it up for “little or nothing is another.”

Like it or not, few Americans share that concern, said Noah Feldman in Bloomberg.com. In an age when Internet users happily hand over troves of personal information to companies like Google and Facebook, most people simply aren’t shocked that the government is sweeping up metadata, and will likely greet Obama’s modest reforms with a shrug. Then the intelligence community will “get back to business more or less as usual.”