Surveillance: The growing demand for limits

It’s the one issue on which many congressional Democrats and Republicans can agree, said Jonathan Weisman in The New York Times: There need to be some new limits on the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance powers. Last week, a bill that would have restricted the NSA’s collection of domestic metadata—the phone numbers, date, time, and duration of all phone calls made in this country—to individuals already under investigation was defeated by just 12 votes, with 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voting in favor of new limits. While the movement to curtail government surveillance originally started out on the political fringes, it now has “a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable.” The growing consensus includes libertarian Republicans, liberal Democrats, and even moderates.

Beware of the rush to neuter the NSA, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. No one is listening to your phone calls or inspecting your Facebook page. The agency uses metadata to detect if terrorists abroad are contacting people within the U.S. So when it identifies a suspicious number in Pakistan, “analysts want to see who that person called in the U.S. and who, in turn, might have been contacted by that second person.” That’s how terrorist networks are uprooted and many plots have been foiled. It’s time for the White House to step up and defend this critical anti-terror tool, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. President Obama has been largely silent during the debate over the collection and analysis of metadata. “This passivity has become a familiar pattern,” with Obama gladly using the security tools he inherited from President Bush, but refusing to spend any political capital defending them to the public. “As the House vote shows, that soon won’t be good enough.”

Next month, “a second wave of bills” to curtail surveillance will be introduced, said David Weigel in Slate.com. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, for example, will propose adding a “devil’s advocate” who would argue for the public interest when the government asks a secret court for permission to spy on people. Even ardent NSA supporters have to admit that this new debate is healthy, said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times. More than a decade after 9/11, it’s high time Americans and Congress gave some real thought to “how much liberty we’re willing to trade off in the name of fighting terrorism.”

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