Obama should go much further with NSA reform

President Barack Obama’s limited proposal to rein in the National Security Agency disappointed many civil libertarians and left some security advocates skeptical and even confused. This reaction is unsurprising given the president’s calculated approach, which strained to achieve a middle ground.

Count us among those disappointed by the president’s muted recommendations, which preserve major elements of the domestic surveillance program and essentially leave it to Congress and the intelligence agencies themselves to implement his plan. Obama missed an opportunity to issue a clarion call to protect civil liberties while simultaneously defending national security — a more forceful voice was called for.

The independent panel advising the president had only a month ago delivered the justification he needed. Instead, Obama rejected some of that advisory panel’s key suggestions and ignored others, fueling what are sure to be contentious battles in Congress as the debate over domestic spying continues.

To be sure, in his highly anticipated speech at the Justice Department in Washington Friday, the president did urge some fundamental changes to the U.S. surveillance apparatus. He wants the government to eventually relinquish control of bulk telephone data collected from virtually all Americans and ordered intelligence agencies to get a secret court’s permission before accessing the records. He told U.S. intelligence agencies to curtail spying on the leaders of allied nations, and said foreign citizens in general deserve some limited privacy protections when their telephone data is collected in the NSA sweeps.

But core questions went unanswered. The president did not say where the bulk data should be stored, which means that for now the NSA will continue to tap into its voluminous cache of Americans’ metadata as usual. And, to the dismay of civil libertarians, he ignored what to them is the core issue: whether that mass personal data should be collected in the first place.

Moreover, Obama rejected a major recommendation of his advisory panel, which would have required the government to obtain prior court approval for the "security letters" it uses to compel companies to turn over information about individual employees. And he didn’t even mention in his speech two issues of paramount interest to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the business community, and which the advisory panel clearly addressed: The panel had advised that the NSA in most cases resist exploiting flaws in commercial software to conduct cyberattacks or surveillance, and that the agency "not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable" commercial software.

The president’s silence on these issues only deepens the global suspicion that American products are compromised.

The review of the U.S. surveillance programs was prompted by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency analyst whose leaks about the formerly secret programs ignited a worldwide outcry. Obama mentioned Snowden only in passing, focusing instead on offering a full-throated defense of the United States’ intelligence agencies and extolling their vital work in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that thrust the nation into a new security realm.

Amid the praise, though, the president did recognize that fundamental changes are in order. His proposal is more tepid than needed, but still signifies an important step forward in the ultimate reform of the NSA.