The review group charged with making recommendations to President Obama on how to reform the National Security Agency has
done its job. Now it's a question of how many of the recommendations the president
will act on.
The advisory group is not the only one weighing and shaping Mr. Obama’s choices. His top counterterrorism aide, Lisa Monaco, is briefing him regularly about an interagency review that deals with many of the same issues as the outside advisory group. “Not all of their recommendations were things we had focused on, and not everything we are focusing on in our review is necessarily addressed in their report,” a senior administration official said Thursday.
The administration expects to accept “a good number” of the advisory group recommendations, the official said, and will “perhaps reject others.”
While few in the White House want to admit as much in public, none of this would have happened without the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now in asylum in Russia. While Mr. Obama has said he welcomes the debate about the proper limits on the N.S.A., it is not one he engaged in publicly until the Snowden revelations began. Now the president has little choice — this week alone a constellation of forces is pushing for change: A federal judge called the bulk-collection program “almost Orwellian,” while some in Congress, many of his allies and Silicon Valley executives demanded change.
Those represent very different pressures. Mr. Obama has already said that bulk collection of telephone records should continue. The unresolved question is whether he agrees with the advisory committee that the records should remain in private hands—either the telecommunications companies or a private consortium—and that individual court authorizations should be required for every use of metadata.
The president has already
rejected one of the recommendations of the group, that a civilian be put in charge of the NSA, and splitting the roles of NSA chief and the military's cyberwarfare command, currently held by Gen. Keith Alexander. Among the rest of the recommendations, some could be done with executive order, but some would probably take legislation.
If the administration and if Congress is truly interested in reforming the NSA, legislation is necessary. That's particularly true if bulk collection is going to end, something a fair number of policy-makers want to see. That includes the original author of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensensbrenner (R-WI) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It also includes some key members of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate: Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) who have been working for months and months to try to alert the public about the vast overreaches of the NSA>
If the NSA is going to respect the law, it has to be reined in now. Congress has to reassert itself and start providing real oversight, something Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has steadfastly refused to provide. No president should have, and the next president should not inherit, an NSA that considers itself above the law.
Oh, by the way, we found out Friday that Britain’s General Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security Agency, spied on UNICEF. UNICEF, for chrissakes!, along with a myriad other international organizations and relief organizations and a whole new set of foreign leaders and ministers. That brings up something for the White House and the Congress to keep in mind now when deciding how seriously to take reforming the NSA: there are going to be many more damaging revelations to come.