WASHINGTON – A chief element of President Barack Obama’s attempt to overhaul U.S. surveillance will not work, leaders of Congress’ intelligence committees said Sunday, pushing back against the idea the government should cede control of how Americans’ phone records are stored.
Obama, under pressure to calm the controversy over government spying, said Friday he wants bulk phone data stored outside the government to reduce the risk the records will be abused. The president said he will require a special judge’s advance approval before intelligence agencies can examine someone’s data and will force analysts to keep their searches closer to suspected terrorists or organizations.
“And I think that’s a very difficult thing,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday.
Under the surveillance program, the NSA gathers, among other things, phone numbers called and the length of conversations but not the content of the calls. Obama said the NSA sometimes needs to tap those records to find people linked to suspected terrorists. But he said eventually the bulk data should be stored somewhere out of the government’s hands. That could mean finding a way for phone companies to store the records – though some companies have balked at the idea, or it could mean creating a third-party entity to hold the records. Obama didn’t say who should have control of Americans’ data; he directed the attorney general and director of national intelligence to find a solution within 60 days.
Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Obama had intensified a sense of uncertainty about the country’s ability to root out terrorist threats. “We really did need a decision on Friday, and what we got was lots of uncertainty,” Rogers, R-Mich., said.
The surveillance programs have been under fire since former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden absconded with an estimated 1.7 million documents related to surveillance and other NSA operations, giving the documents to journalists around the world. Revelations in the documents sparked a furor over whether the American government has been giving up privacy protections for its citizens in exchange for intelligence-gathering on terrorism.
Congress will have a lot of say in how and whether Obama’s ideas are carried out.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has proposed to end the NSA’s bulk data collection program, putting him at odds with his fellow Democrat Feinstein on the issue. Leahy said senators would have many questions for Attorney General Eric Holder when he comes before the Judiciary Committee next week.
“The question is,” Leahy said on Fox. “what is Congress going to do on this? ... I just think that there should be an oversight.
“I mean, I was a prosecutor for eight years; I believe in going after the bad guys,” Leahy said. “And I realize this is an entirely different level of the bad guys that I went after, but you still have to have some checks and balances, or you have a government that can run amok.”
