Americas

Americas

Obamaâ€™s experts panel: Keep spying on Americans

19 December 2013 04:57 (UTC +04:00)

The White House has issued a 308-page report based on the findings of the advisory panel which was tasked with restoring public confidence in the nation’s spying apparatus after recent revelations by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden shed some light on the scope and scale of the National Security Agency’s spying activities.

The panel has come up with 46 recommendations, none of which the administration is obliged to undertake, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Obama’s experts have called on Congress to pass legislation that would disallow the NSA to store Americans’ phone records, which number over 1 trillion, according to some former officials.

Nevertheless, the panel suggests the phone records be stored by a private third-party company instead and access to the data be permitted through an order from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“We are not in any way recommending the disarming of the intelligence community,” said Michael Morell, former Deputy Director of the CIA and one of five members of the presidential Review Group on Intelligence.

The advisory panel also recommended that the NSA’s information assurance directorate—its computer defense arm—be moved outside the spy agency and under the Department of Defense’s cyber policy office.

The panel has further recommended an end to the FBI’s use of National Security Letters. The FBI used these letters to force private businesses to hand over financial records, phone information and even internet search histories without a search warrant signed by a judge.

Some US officials have said the Obama administration is not likely to accept substantive changes to its phone data collection program which gathers records, including numbers, call times and duration, from US phone companies and stores them for five years.

US District Judge Richard Leon on Monday called the mass collection program “almost Orwellian” and ruled that the US government "almost certainly" violated the constitution.