Obama's Defense of NSA Surveillance Doesn't Hold Up

At a press conference this
afternoon, President Obama was asked about the efficacy of the
National Security Agency’s bulk phone records surveillance
programs. Noting that while defending the programs in a recent
court case the government did not specify any instance in which the
program stopped an imminent attack, Mark Felsenthal of Reuters
asked the president if he could cite specific examples of attacks
stopped by the program, and whether Obama believed that the data
collection, in its current form, was “useful to national
security.”

President Obama’s response was revealing,as much for what he
said as for what he didn’t. The president did not cite any instance
in which the bulk phone records collection program, which gathers
information about calls made by hundreds of millions of Americans,
had stopped an imminent attack. The omission suggests there may not
be any such example to cite.

Yet the president defended the surveillance program as vital to
national security anyway. The program, he
said, has “allowed the NSA to be confident in pursuing various
investigations of terrorist threats.”

What’s more, he argued, despite controversy over the program and
related surveillance operations, there have been no allegations of
abuse. “It’s important to note that in all the reviews of this
program that have been done, in fact, there have not been actual
instances where it’s been alleged that the NSA in some ways acted
inappropriately in the use of this data.” Obama vouched for the
program, saying, “I have confidence in the fact that the NSA is not
engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around.”

That’s just not true. The very nature of the bulk phone metadata
collection program in question is domestic surveillance—a form of
snooping around that inevitably sweeps up data on American
citizens.

There have also been documented instances of abuse. In August,
the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg News that several cases of willful
noncompliance with the agency’s own guidelines had been discovered.

Roughly a dozen instances of improper behavior were
discovered.

Other reports have
found that NSA employees on occasion used agency surveillance
tools to spy on lovers. The agency, along with other intelligence
organizations, also spent millions of dollars studying and spying
on online video game worlds to no productive counterterrorism
result.  In August, Reuters
reported that data created by NSA intercepts justified as
counter-terror measures was in fact being used to facilitate drug
crime investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

A strict focus on these individual reports, however, misses the
larger point, which is that the very existence of the NSA’s bulk
data collection program is itself abusive, regardless of specific
policy infringements. That was the point made by Richard Leon, the
District Judge who earlier this week issued a
ruling suggesting that the program was unconstitutional. But
while Obama suggested that he might be willing to tweak the NSA’s
methods, he does not appear to be willing to rethink the program’s
fundamental surveillance goals. “The question we’re going to have
to ask is can we accomplish the same goals that this program is
intended to accomplish in ways that give the public more confidence
that in fact the NSA is doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” he
said, adding later that “there may be another way of skinning the
cat.” Translation: If he reforms the program, it might feel
slightly different, but it will actually be just the
same.