The White House said today it would release later in the day a report of a presidential advisory committee that issued more than 40 recommendations about how to alter the National Security Agency’s data gathering at home and abroad.
The announcement by the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, came just after President Barack Obama met with the five members of his review board in the ’situation room’, where they explained a series of recommendations that one official described as “significantly more far-reaching than many expected.”
According to officials familiar with the report, the advisory group called for continuing the bulk collection of data about telephone calls but moving it to private hands, a process that officials say could take several years. Some members of the group also favored splitting command of the NSA, which conducts surveillance, from the US Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare unit, to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of a single individual. But Mr Obama has rejected that approach.
The report is also highly critical of some of the NSA practices that have most angered technology companies, like the agency’s effort to make sure that the government can gain access to all encrypted communications, and the purchase by government agencies of information about previously undiscovered flaws in common software, especially Microsoft Windows, that could be exploited by government hackers. These are known as “zero day” flaws because they have never been seen before and thus give the NSA and the Cyber Command a way to launch attacks on foreign computer systems. That was a key technique in the US and Israeli joint attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, but it also sews distrust in US products.
These recommendations are likely to be opposed by many in the intelligence community, for fear that they will tie the hands of the agencies as they seek to break the encrypted conversations of terrorist groups, rogue states, nuclear proliferators and others.
Initially, the White House had intended to release the report in January, simultaneous with Mr Obama’s decisions about how to respond to it, and Mr Carney had repeated that time frame as recently as yesterday. But today, Mr Carney said that by making the report public, Americans could judge the contents of the findings themselves.
The decision, however, puts more pressure on Mr Obama after a federal court said this week, for the first time, that bulk collection of data about telephone calls made by Americans was probably unconstitutional. It also comes amid complaints from business executives that NSA surveillance methods revealed by Edward J Snowden, the former contractor who disclosed many of the agency’s programs, were harmful to US businesses trying to sell hardware, cloud services and social networks abroad.
NYT