Last summer, President Barack Obama asked the
Privacy and Civil Liberties
Oversight Board to look into the effectiveness and legalities
of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.
The Board was especially to investigate the NSA’s clandestine
collection of essentially all of the phone records of Americans.
The PCLOB was established to monitor the activities of federal law
enforcement, counter-terrorism, and spy agencies in an effort to
make sure that the executive branch is not violating the civil
liberties of Americans.
According to the
Washington Post and the
New York Times, the PCLOB report, which will be issued
today, finds that the NSA’s massive domestic surveillance program
is illegal and largely useless and should be ended. From the
Times:
The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215
[of the PATRIOT Act], implicates constitutional concerns under the
First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and
civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited
value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that
the government end the program.”
The panel further noted, as the Post reports:
“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to
the United States in which the telephone records program made a
concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism
investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by
The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in
which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a
previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist
attack.”…“The Board believes that the Section 215 program has contributed
only minimal value in combating terrorism beyond what the
government already achieves through these and other alternative
means,” the report said. “Cessation of the program would eliminate
the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk
collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while
ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling
records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations.”
The Board explicitly rejected claims made by NSA enablers that
the agencies massive telephone spying program could have prevented
the 9/11 atrocities or helped disrupt the New York City subway
bombing plot.
The PCLOB report finds that the NSA claim that the telephone
calling data of all Americans is “relevant to an authorized
investigation” is an absurd interpretation of the PATRIOT Act. The
Post reports that …
… the board found that it is impossible that all the records
collected — billions daily — could be relevant to a single
investigation “without redefining that word in a manner that is
circular, unlimited in scope.”…“At its core, the approach boils
down to the proposition that essentially all telephone records are
relevant to essentially all international terrorism
investigations,” the report said. This approach, it said, “at
minimum, is in deep tension with the statutory requirement that
items obtained through a Section 215 order be sought for ‘an
investigation,’ not for the purpose of enhancing the government’s
counterterrorism capabilities generally.”
The Board rejected the proposal that there should be a central
repository holding data on the phone calls of all Americans.
Federal agencies can seek data from individual telephone companies
on a case-by-case basis using constitutionally authorized
procedures, e.g., warrants issued on the basis of probable
cause.
President Obama was briefed on the Board’s findings before his
speech last Friday in which he outlined a couple of
very feeble proposals for reforming the NSA’s unconstitutional
domestic spying operations. He evidently didn’t listen to his own
oversight board.
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