14 DAY TRIAL // The committee the White House named to examine the operations of the National Security Agency found that the program to collect cellphone data records in the United States should continue, although some new restraints should be implemented to increase privacy.
While the official report hasn’t been revealed yet, the New York Times quotes officials with knowledge of the file.
The committee was supposed to come with the report a while back and it was expected from the beginning that it would not hold an actual, responsible review of what the NSA had been doing. The five members of the group were handpicked by the administration, and despite the fact that they were dubbed as “independent,” they all had ties with the government, one of them even serving as the deputy director of the CIA.
Furthermore, the report wouldn’t even be presented in its initial form to the public, but would first have to get the green light from the White House. Basically, it’s fairly hard to trust anything in the report.
Aside from the fact that the committee encourages the US to continue collecting phone call metadata, leaked information indicates that the file argues in favor of codifying and publicly announcing the steps the United States will take to protect the privacy of foreign citizens whose data gets collected by the NSA. It remains unclear how this would actually happen since foreigners don’t have the protection of the Fourth Amendment of the American Constitution.
Furthermore, it seems that the report also advises senior White House officials to directly review the list of foreign leaders whose communications were monitored by the NSA, including Angela Merkel and the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, as revealed by this summer’s reports.
Moreover, it looks like the White House has taken over supervision of this particular program, shutting out James Clapper, who seems to have been in the know about the issue.