Several of the key surveillance reforms unveiled by US President Barack Obama face complications that could muddy the proposals’ lawfulness, slow their momentum in the US Congress and saddle the government with heavy costs and bureaucracy, legal experts say.
Despite Obama’s plans to shift the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass storage of Americans’ bulk telephone records elsewhere, telephone companies do not want the responsibility, and the government could face privacy and structural hurdles in relying on any other entity to store the data.
Constitutional analysts also question the legal underpinning of Obama’s commitment to setting up an advisory panel of privacy experts to intervene in some proceedings of the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the NSA’s data mining operations. Obama has asked Congress to set up such a panel, but senior federal judges already oppose the move, citing practical and legal drawbacks.
The secret courts now operate with only the government making its case to a federal judge for examining someone’s telephone data. Civil libertarians have called for a voice in the room that might offer the judge an opposing view.
“The devil is in the details of how the government collects and retains phone records, and I think we’re going to see pretty quickly the lack of specificity behind some of the president’s promises,” American Civil Liberties Union executive director Anthony Romero said.
The surveillance programs have been under fire since former NSA analyst Edward Snowden absconded with an estimated 1.7 million documents related to surveillance and other NSA operations, giving the documents to journalists around the world. Revelations in the documents sparked a furor over whether Americans have been giving up privacy protections in exchange for intelligence-gathering on terrorism.
The revelations about US surveillance programs have also damaged US relations with key allies, including Germany, following reports that the NSA had monitored communications of European citizens — even listening in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
Obstacles to enacting Obama’s plans are expected to mount quickly as administration officials and legislators grapple over what sort of entity will oversee the calling records swept up by the NSA. Obama ordered the US Department of Justice and intelligence officials to devise a plan within the next two months.
Privacy advocates also questioned the administration’s silence on what it will do with hundreds of millions of telephone records, at minimum, that are now kept on file in government inventories.
Citing the NSA’s plans to build a vast data storage facility in Utah, Romero said: “There was nothing in the president’s speech about what’s already in the government’s hands.”
Obama’s task force, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, had recommended cutting the time that the NSA could retain private records from five to two years. However, Obama’s proposals do not address the issue of duration, leaving those records still in NSA control for the foreseeable future.
Who or what takes over the storage of private telephone records is also at issue. Telephone company executives and their lawyers have bluntly told administration officials they do not want to become the NSA’s data minders. Cellular industry executives prefer the NSA keep control over the surveillance program and would only accept changes if they were legally required and spelled out in legislation.
Even with broader legal protections to shield telephone companies from liability, the corporations are wary of being forced to standardize their own data collection to conform to the NSA’s needs. Telecoms already retain various forms of customer records, but the duration of their storage and the kinds of records they keep vary from less than two years, for firms including Verizon, US Cellular and Sprint, to seven to 10 years, for T-Mobile.
Shifting control of telephone metadata from the NSA to cellular providers would cost the government in excess of US$60 million, according to government estimates.
However, telecom executives say the need to build new technical infrastructure and add more staff to contend with records demands would cost far more.
Legal experts say that hiring a private firm or creating a new independent entity to store and oversee the NSA’s telephone records is an even greater hurdle.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not