NSA Reportedly Recommending End to Surveillance Stemming From 9/11 Draws Cheers
NSA apparently recommending an end to a surveillance program created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that collects information about Americans’ phone calls and texts drew a few cheers in the minutes after The Wall Street Journal report. The surveillance authority would make the recommendation to the White House, which reportedly hasn't made a decision. The NSA declined comment.
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Now part of the USA Freedom Act, some Section 215 provisions that let NSA with a special surveillance court's order see cellphone and text metadata would expire at year's end without congressional renewal. The agency has indicated it hasn't used the program for a while, privacy advocates noted in interviews Wednesday evening. The agency would recommend how the White House should propose Congress proceed regarding the act's expiring provisions, said Center for Democracy & Technology Freedom, Security and Technology Project Director Greg Nojeim. The administration would consult with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, FBI and perhaps with other agencies and then convey its position to Capitol Hill, he noted. There have been no public indications such action is near.
What's "most important is how Congress reacts" to this development, Nojeim said. "The wisest path would be to let it lapse. So that if a subsequent NSA director believed that the program was justified, [he or she] would have to justify it to Congress. In the face of evidence so far that the program hasn’t stopped any terror attacks, that would be a hard sell."
If NSA is "itself recognizing that it is not worth seeking renewal of this program," said New America's Open Technology Institute Surveillance and Cybersecurity Policy Director Sharon Bradford Franklin, she "would commend them for that and not clinging to the notion that 'one day we may want this legal authority, so we should push to retain it.’" She said it's concerning the program lets NSA get metadata for two hops, that is those who communicate with someone whose communications are with a person being surveilled. Connections that are two degrees of separation out, she noted, are "people who are not reasonably suspected of wrongdoing."
If a "target has talked to 200 different people in the last 18 months (a low estimate based on our informal sampling), and if each of those 200 people has also called or been called by 200 different people, then a two-hop request would vacuum up records relating to 40,000 people," estimated then-American Civil Liberties Union Speech, Privacy and Technology Project Senior Staff Attorney Alex Abdo in 2014. That's in the run-up to when the law last came up for renewal. "It only gets worse if one of the numbers in the first hop belongs to a high-volume caller -- like a pizza shop, an advertising company, or a hospital," Abdo added. The ACLU didn't comment now.