Telecoms Not Exactly Thrilled to Be Part of Obama’s NSA Reform Plan

As part of President Barack Obama’s
relatively mild National Security Administration surveillance
reforms (written about earlier today
here,
here, and
here), he proposed taking the bulk metadata information storage
out of the hands of the NSA to avoid giving the government
unfettered access and putting it into the hands of third-party
companies, possibly telecoms. This would then require the NSA to
request metadata, adding another gatekeeper to avoid abuse of the
system.

One problem. Why would telecoms agree to do this, given how
upset Americans have become over these revelations? As The
Washington Post notes, they do not want to serve as the

NSA’s storage service:

Telecommunications firms said they were pleased about limits to
the collection of bulk metadata, but said they have unanswered
questions on details of reforms, particularly on changes to the
phones records database. The database, Obama said, would be removed
from government control to a third party. Phone companies don’t
want to have the responsibility of keeping the database, they
said.

In a statement after the speech, the wireless industry’s biggest
lobbying group, CTIA-The Wireless Association, stressed that it
believes privacy and security “can be achieved without the
imposition of data retention mandates that obligate carriers to
keep customer information any longer than necessary for legitimate
business purposes.”

Read the full story
here. Some tech firm representatives are upset that the bulk
collection is going to continue at all without any sort of warrant.
Furthermore, one industry representative noted that the president
said nothing about allegations that the NSA was involved in the
subversion of industry encryption standards.

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