Earlier today, President Obama announced a series of reforms to address abuses by the National Security Agency. We were heartened to see Obama recognized that the NSA has gone too far in trampling the privacy rights of people worldwide. In his speech, the President ensured that National Security Letters would not come with perpetual gag orders, brought new levels of transparency and fairness to the FISA court, and ended bulk collection of telephone records by the NSA. However, there is still much more to be done.
We’ve put together a scorecard showing how Obama’s announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance. Each necessary reform was worth 1 point, and we were willing to award partial credit for steps in the right direction. On that scale, President Obama racked up 3.5 points out of a possible 12.
Score: .2
There are three types of mass surveillance that we know about that we were using to evaluate Obama’s promises in this category: surveillance of millions of phone records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act; surveillance of Internet communications internationally under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act; and surveillance of communications overseas under Executive Order 12333.
In order to score a full point in this category, Obama would have needed to declare that the executive branch would no longer be using any of these authorities to engage in mass surveillance. He tackled only one of these issues somewhat: the surveillance of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Specifically, he acknowledged the recommendations of his review group that the government cease to collect and maintain a database of all Americans’ telephone records. He is ending that program, which is laudable. However, he left open the door to having telecom companies or another third party maintain a similar set of mass data, so even as to 215, we could not give him the full ⅓ of the point.
Score: .3
All too often, the NSA’s official position is that foreigners—or anybody deemed sufficiently likely to not be a “U.S. person”—are not given any legal protections under surveillance laws. This situation is unacceptable and out of line with international human rights law, as we’ve put forth in our Necessary and Proportionate Principles, now supported by over 300 organizations worldwide. We demanded that individualized targeting be conducted for non-US persons.
Obama nodded a bit to this situation, and proposed that some reforms be made, but did not give real specifics. While he also did not acknowledge any legal obligations, he did recognize a “special obligation” on U.S. intelligence agencies, and specifically called out a new, higher standard on eavesdropping on foreign leaders. But that’s not enough: privacy consideration should not be a privilege afforded only to top officials. Given these small steps forward but ongoing problems, we’ve given Obama .3 points in this category.