As mentioned here, Geoffrey R. Stone, one of the five members of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, charged with the responsibility of making recommendations about NSA surveillance and related issues, has been writing at the Huffington Post a series of excellent, objective essays — as it appears to be also the case with the study and recommendations. In Stone’s own words:
We did not care what the White House wanted, what the Intelligence Community wanted, or what the civil libertarians wanted. We delivered, we believe, what the President wanted: a careful, honest, balanced and independent evaluation of the tough realities of protecting the nation through effective intelligence collection while simultaneously upholding the liberties that are at the very core of our national identity.
To-date, the essays have addressed Stone’s service on the President’s Review Group, looked at the nature and operation of the NSA’s bulk-telephony meta-data program and examined the government’s arguments for the meta-data program and the Review Group’s analysis of those arguments and reasoning behind some of the Group’s 46 recommendations to the President.
In the latter essay, Stone examines each of the “essentially four arguments” that the government has offered in defending the bulk telephony meta-data program:
That the program is an important tool in the effort to keep our nation safe because it enables the government to discover when a suspected terrorist is in contact with other possible terrorists inside the United States and can provide critical data in the effort to “connect the dots.”
That the collection and storage of bulk telephony metadata does not seriously intrude on individual privacy because individuals have voluntarily exposed their calling data to a third party — that is, to their telephone service providers.
That the collection and storage of bulk telephony meta-data does not seriously intrude on individual privacy because the nature of the information at issue — mere calling data — does not itself reveal anything particularly private. It would be a different case, the government argues, if it was collecting and storing the content of telephone calls, which would be much more invasive of individual privacy.
Finally, that the government has in place rigorous oversight and review procedures to ensure that the database is not used for any improper purpose. Procedures that prohibit any use of the data for any purpose other than to identify possible terrorist activity.
The Review Group carefully and methodically evaluated and weighed each of these four considerations and concluded that…
…even though the bulk telephony meta-data program might “make it easier for the government to protect the nation from terrorism,” that in itself does not mean that it should be permitted. Noting that “every limitation on the government’s ability to monitor our conduct makes it more difficult for the government to prevent bad things from happening,” the Review Group emphasized that the ultimate “question is not whether granting the government authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty, and public trust.”
And on that question — is the additional safety worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty, and public trust — the Review Group concluded:
[P]articularly in light of the availability of other means by which the government could achieve its objectives, “there is no sufficient justification for allowing the government to collect and store bulk telephony meta-data. We recommend that this program should be terminated as soon as reasonably practicable.”
Stone promised to spell out in his next essay the “other means” by which the government can achieve its objectives, and to address the constitutionality of the telephony meta-data program.
In his latest column on this issue, Stone states that while the Review Group “found that access to telephony meta-data can be useful to the government in its effort to identify terrorists operating inside the United States,” the challenge is to figure out “how best to preserve the legitimate value of the program while at the same time reducing its risks personal privacy and individual freedom.”
Stone summarizes the important changes the Group recommends to that end — to “strike a better balance.”
They are:
First, and perhaps most important, the Review Group recommends that the government should not be permitted to store the telephony meta-data. That the telephony meta-data should be held by private entities.
Second, that the government should be required to obtain a judicial order before it is allowed to query the database…requiring “a neutral and detached federal judge, rather than an NSA analyst, to decide in each instance whether the government has reasonable grounds to believe that a particular telephone number is in fact associated with terrorist activity.”
Third, that the telephony meta-data should be held by the private entities for no longer than two years, rather than the current five years.
Fourth, that “any judicial order authorizing the government to query the database must, like a subpoena, be ‘reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth…’”
Fifth, that “legislation should be enacted requiring that detailed information about the section 215 telephony meta-data program “should be made available on a regular basis to Congress and the American people to the greatest extent possible, consistent with the need to protect classified information.”
Sixth, that “the decision to keep secret from the American people programs of the magnitude of the section 215 bulk telephony meta-data program should be made only after careful deliberation at high levels of government and only with due consideration of and respect for the strong presumption of transparency that is central to democratic governance.”
Finally, the Group’s conclusion is that, with the above recommendations in place, “the government can legitimately make use of the telephony meta-data in its critically important effort to keep our nation safe (emphasis mine), while at the same time respecting America’s core commitment to the values of privacy, individual freedom, and democratic self-governance.”
I believe that this is the civil, constructive debate most of us have been demanding to balance our civil rights, privacy and freedom with national security.
Please read the entire column here.
Image: www.shutterstock.com
