WASHINGTON — A panel of outside advisers urged President Obama on Wednesday to impose major restrictions on the National Security Agency, arguing that in the past dozen years its powers had been enhanced at the expense of personal privacy.
Specifically the panel of five intelligence and legal experts recommended that Mr. Obama restructure a program in which the N.S.A. systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts. Instead, the panel said, the data should remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and a court order should be necessary each time analysts want to access the information of any individual “for queries and data mining.”
The experts briefed Mr. Obama on Wednesday on their 46 recommendations, and a senior administration official said Mr. Obama was “open to many” of the changes, though he has already rejected one that called for separate leaders for the N.S.A. and its Pentagon cousin, the United States Cyber Command.
If Mr. Obama adopts the majority of the recommendations, it would mark the first major restrictions on the unilateral powers that the N.S.A. has acquired since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They would require the agency to seek far more specific approvals from the courts, far more oversight from the Congress, and specific presidential approval for spying on national leaders, especially allies. The agency would also have to give up one of its most potent weapons in cyberconflicts: The ability to insert “back doors” in American hardware or software, or purchase previously unknown flaws in software that it can use to conduct cyberattacks.
“We have identified a series of reforms that are designed to safeguard the privacy and dignity of American citizens, and to promote public trust, while also allowing the intelligence community to do what must be done to respond to genuine threats,” says the report, which Mr. Obama commissioned in August in response to the mounting furor over revelations by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, of the agency’s surveillance practices.
It adds: “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”
White House officials said they expected significant resistance to some of the report’s conclusions from the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, which have argued that imposing rules that could slow the search for terror suspects could pave the way for another attack. But those intelligence leaders were not present in the Situation Room on Wednesday when Mr. Obama met the authors of the report.
The report’s authors made clear that they were weighing the N.S.A.’s surveillance requirements against other priorities like constitutional protections for privacy and economic considerations for American businesses. The report came just three days after a Federal judge in Washington ruled that the bulk collection of telephone data by the government was “almost Orwellian” and a day after Silicon Valley executives complained to Mr. Obama that the N.S.A. programs were undermining American competitiveness in offering cloud services or selling American-made hardware, which is now viewed as tainted.
The report was praised by privacy advocates in Congress and civil-liberties groups as a surprisingly aggressive call for reform.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has been an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance, said that in key ways it echoed the arguments of the N.S.A.’s skeptics, noting that the report flatly declared that the phone-logging program had not been necessary in stopping terrorist attacks.
“This has been a big week for the cause of intelligence reform,” he said.
Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology called the report “remarkably strong,” and singled out its call to sharply limit the F.B.I.’s power to obtain business records about someone using a so-called “national security letter,” a subpoena that does not involve court oversight.
Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.
Specifically the panel of five intelligence and legal experts recommended that Mr. Obama restructure a program in which the N.S.A. systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts. Instead, the panel said, the data should remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and a court order should be necessary each time analysts want to access the information of any individual “for queries and data mining.”
The experts briefed Mr. Obama on Wednesday on their 46 recommendations, and a senior administration official said Mr. Obama was “open to many” of the changes, though he has already rejected one that called for separate leaders for the N.S.A. and its Pentagon cousin, the United States Cyber Command.
If Mr. Obama adopts the majority of the recommendations, it would mark the first major restrictions on the unilateral powers that the N.S.A. has acquired since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They would require the agency to seek far more specific approvals from the courts, far more oversight from the Congress, and specific presidential approval for spying on national leaders, especially allies. The agency would also have to give up one of its most potent weapons in cyberconflicts: The ability to insert “back doors” in American hardware or software, or purchase previously unknown flaws in software that it can use to conduct cyberattacks.
“We have identified a series of reforms that are designed to safeguard the privacy and dignity of American citizens, and to promote public trust, while also allowing the intelligence community to do what must be done to respond to genuine threats,” says the report, which Mr. Obama commissioned in August in response to the mounting furor over revelations by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, of the agency’s surveillance practices.
It adds: “Free nations must protect themselves, and nations that protect themselves must remain free.”
White House officials said they expected significant resistance to some of the report’s conclusions from the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, which have argued that imposing rules that could slow the search for terror suspects could pave the way for another attack. But those intelligence leaders were not present in the Situation Room on Wednesday when Mr. Obama met the authors of the report.
The report’s authors made clear that they were weighing the N.S.A.’s surveillance requirements against other priorities like constitutional protections for privacy and economic considerations for American businesses. The report came just three days after a Federal judge in Washington ruled that the bulk collection of telephone data by the government was “almost Orwellian” and a day after Silicon Valley executives complained to Mr. Obama that the N.S.A. programs were undermining American competitiveness in offering cloud services or selling American-made hardware, which is now viewed as tainted.
The report was praised by privacy advocates in Congress and civil-liberties groups as a surprisingly aggressive call for reform.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has been an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance, said that in key ways it echoed the arguments of the N.S.A.’s skeptics, noting that the report flatly declared that the phone-logging program had not been necessary in stopping terrorist attacks.
“This has been a big week for the cause of intelligence reform,” he said.
Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology called the report “remarkably strong,” and singled out its call to sharply limit the F.B.I.’s power to obtain business records about someone using a so-called “national security letter,” a subpoena that does not involve court oversight.
Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.