Obama promises surveillance changes

US president Barack Obama announced plans yesterday to limit sweeping US government surveillance programmes that have come under criticism since leaks by a former spy agency contractor, saying the United States "can and must be more transparent".

"Given the history of abuse by governments, it's right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives," Mr Obama told a news conference at the White House.

Saying that it was important to strike the right balance between security and civil liberties, Mr Obama vowed to improve oversight of surveillance and restore public trust in the government’s programmes.

“It’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programmes. The American people need to have confidence in them, as well,” Mr Obama said, adding that he was confident the programmes were not being abused.

Partial victory
The announcement – made just before Mr Obama heads for summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard – may be greeted as a partial victory for supporters of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who is now in Russia, where he was granted asylum last week.

The Obama administration has vigorously pursued Mr Snowden to bring him back to the US to face espionage charges for leaking details of the surveillance programs to the media.

"I don't think Mr Snowden was a patriot," Mr Obama said. The president said he had ordered a review of the surveillance programmes before Mr Snowden provided secret documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post, but he added that there was no doubt those leaks triggered a "much more rapid, passionate response" to the issue.

Mr Obama said he had decided on four specific measures.

Firstly, he said, he plans to work with Congress to pursue "appropriate reforms" of Section 215 of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act that governs the collection of so-called "metadata" such as phone records. He insisted that the government had no interest in spying on ordinary Americans.

Mr Obama did not specifically lay out how the programme will be reined in, however. Instead, he pledged greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints.

Civil liberties advocates wanted more details.

“He said he would recommend 215 reform, but he said ‘appropriate’ reform and we don’t know what that means,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights analyst Trevor Timm. “There were no concrete changes to the actual surveillance programs.”

Outlining his second measure, Mr Obama said he would pursue with Congress a reform of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which considers requests from law enforcement authorities to target an individual for intelligence gathering.

Mr Obama said he wants to let a civil liberties representative weigh in on the court’s deliberations to ensure an adversarial voice is heard.

More details
Thirdly, Mr Obama said he wanted to provide more details about the NSA programmes to try to restore public trust damaged by the Snowden disclosures.

The fourth measure was the creation of a high-level group of outside experts to review the US surveillance effort.

On the US relationship with Russia, Mr Obama denied he had poor relations with Vladimir Putin after cancelling their Moscow talks, but said the Russian president can sometimes appear "like a bored kid in the back of the classroom".

“I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we’re in conversations together, oftentimes it’s very productive,” Mr Obama said.

Mr Obama said the US will “take a pause, reassess where it is that Russia is going” and calibrate the relationship to take into account the areas where they can agree and acknowledge that they have differences.

“Frankly, on a whole range of issues where we think we can make some progress, Russia has not moved,” Mr Obama said. – (Reuters)