14 DAY TRIAL // The White House’s privacy chief seems to be adamant about shutting down the bulk metadata collection program that the NSA conducts, even if the president doesn’t seem to be too sure about this.
David Medine had just taken the job as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when the NSA scandal broke last summer.
During his first week, he had already requested a briefing with the Justice Department on the topic and by the third week on his job, he’d already met with the president in the Situation Room, ArsTechnica reports.
The team was then tasked to deliver a report on the NSA’s practices. A few months later, the five members of the board argued that the NSA must cease the bulk collection of telephony metadata, including the numbers of all calls, international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the time and duration of the calls made to and from the United States.
They decided that the program raised some constitutional concerns, something that was stressed a few weeks later by a federal judge, who said that the country’s founding fathers would be aghast at what the NSA had been doing.
Even so, with the panel’s report, along with another one coming from an independent group named by the president, who gave a similar reasoning, the White House is reluctant to put a stop to this blatant violation of privacy.
The US President announced a set of reforms a while back, but their impact is so slim that no one has really taken them seriously. In regard to this particular program, Obama said that the NSA would no longer be allowed to hold any data, but that things would still be collected. It hasn’t been made clear thus far, but expectations indicate that telcos will be the ones charged with collecting and storing all metadata.
Additionally, the NSA would actually require a court order before going through the records. However, the order would be signed by the same FISA court that hasn’t really said “no” to the intelligence agency in years.
Regardless, Medine seems positive about the whole thing, saying that, “The important thing is we get there and stop collecting the bulk information. Sounds like there is a commitment to getting it done. Hopefully it won't be a long transition period.”
This will likely depend on how much lobbying the NSA will do in the next few months.