WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s orders to change some U.S. surveillance practices put the burden on Congress to deal with a national security controversy alarming Americans and outraging foreign allies. Yet he avoided major action on the practice of sweeping up billions of phone, email and text messages from across the globe.
In a speech at the Justice Department on Friday, Obama said he was placing new limits on the way intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans – and was moving toward eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government’s hands.
His promises to end government storage of its collection of data on Americans’ telephone calls – and require judicial review to examine the data – were met with skepticism from privacy advocates and some lawmakers.
But Obama has made it nearly impossible for reluctant leaders in Congress to avoid making some changes in the U.S. phone surveillance they have supported for years.
Obama admitted he has been torn between how to protect privacy rights and how to protect the U.S. from terror attacks – what officials have called the main purpose of the spy programs.
“The challenge is getting the details right, and that is not simple,” he said.
The president said his proposals “should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe.”
Obama acknowledged more needs to be done, but he largely left it to Congress to work out the details.
Plans to end the sweep of phone records have been building momentum in Congress among both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Congressional leadership and the chairmen of the intelligence committees who for years have signed off on the programs have opposed dramatic changes.
Obama’s order signals that the phone program must be overhauled, and lawmakers called his speech a welcome first step.
“It is now time for Congress to take the next step by enacting legislation to appropriately limit these programs,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
The leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees, which have proposed far less sweeping legislation, threw the responsibility back to Obama.
“We encourage the White House to send legislation with the president’s proposed changes to Congress so they can be fully debated,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said in a coolly worded statement.
Privacy advocates called Obama’s proposal a shell game – by assigning the collection to a new, as-of-yet undecided entity instead of ending it outright. They had even sharper criticism for the speech’s scant attention to the NSA program that intercepts billions of overseas Internet messages and phone conversations from foreigners each day.
The program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allows the U.S. government to read or listen to the messages and phone calls as long as they do not target American citizens who live overseas.
Obama said he would seek new restrictions on the government’s ability to collect or use the overseas messages that accidentally included messages or phone calls from Americans. But he did not spell out how, or by when.
Nor did Obama specify any sweeping changes to the so-called 702 program to protect foreigners’ privacy, although he did broadly promise to order “the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas.” He said that would include limiting the time that the U.S. holds the foreign information it collects and restricting its use.
Given the mass of the foreign communications surveillance, the reforms offered Friday offered just a “sliver” of respite from fears of U.S. spying, said Matt Simons, director of social and economic justice at Chicago-based software company ThoughtWorks.
“There was a clear attempt to narrow down what we’re talking about to the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit,” Simons said, whose company is among a number of U.S. tech firms demanding broad reforms to prevent their clients from defecting to foreign firms that might offer more protections.
Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, predicted the foreign surveillance under Section 702 will be Congress’ next target after the government stops storing its collection of Americans’ phone records. The group is suing the NSA to reveal more information about the programs.
At a Brookings Institution forum Friday afternoon, intelligence experts debated the effects of Obama’s orders on privacy, security and commerce. While the collection of Americans’ phone records “is the molten core of the political debate,” the surveillance of foreigners’ communications is at the heart of NSA operations, senior fellow Benjamin Wittes said.
Tech industry: Obama’s NSA reforms ‘insufficient’
SAN FRANCISCO – Technology companies and industry groups took President Barack Obama’s speech on U.S. surveillance as a step in the right direction but chided him for not embracing more dramatic reforms to protect people’s privacy and the economic interests of American companies that generate most of their revenue overseas.
“The president’s speech was empathetic, balanced and thoughtful, but insufficient to meet the real needs of our globally connected world and a free Internet,” Ed Black said, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a group that represents Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other technology companies upset about the NSA’s broad surveillance of online communications.
Eight of the world’s best-known technology companies underscored their common interest in curbing the NSA by releasing a joint, measured critique of Obama’s proposal. They applauded the commitment to more transparency and more privacy protections for non-U.S. citizens, but also stressed the president didn’t address all their concerns.
Nothing Obama said is likely to diminish the potential losses facing the U.S. technology industry, said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington D.C. think tank.
The ITIF estimates the doubts raised by the NSA spying could cost U.S. companies as much as $35 billion over the next three years.
In the aftermath of recent NSA leaks, the companies set aside their competitive differences to come together and urge Obama to curtail the NSA’s online snooping and lift restrictions preventing companies from publicly disclosing specifics about how frequently they are asked to turn over their users’ personal information in the name of national security.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes there’s still a long way to go. “Now it’s up to the courts, Congress, and the public to ensure that real reform happens, including stopping all bulk surveillance – not just telephone records collection,” she said.
Recent revelations about how much information the U.S. government has been vacuuming off the Internet threaten to undercut the future profits of technology companies that depend on the trust of Web surfers and corporate customers.
U.S. Internet companies are worried that more people, especially those living outside the U.S., will use their products less frequently if they believe their personal data is being scooped up and stored by the U.S. government.
Less online traffic would result in fewer opportunities to sell the ads that bring in most of the revenue at companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo. There is also concern that foreigners will be reluctant to do business with a wide range of U.S. companies that sell online storage and software applications that require an Internet connection.
Obama’s proposal made “progress on the privacy side, but it doesn’t address the economic issues,” Castro said. “I don’t see anything in the speech that will prevent companies in other countries from using what the NSA is doing to gain a competitive advantage over the U.S. companies.”
