Obama Readies Revamp of NSA

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  • Obama Readies Revamp of NSA - WSJ.com
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579311051971481812

    The #NSA -review panel recommended that 1/the U.S. should extend to non-U.S. citizens the protections of the Privacy Act of 1974 . The president is leaning toward accepting that proposal, the senior administration official said. Details of how the privacy protections would be applied were unclear.
    #surveillance

    Applying privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens would be a significant shift in U.S. posture that wasn’t proposed seriously until the uproar overseas in response to disclosures by Mr. Snowden, which suggested that the NSA had built a global surveillance operation that regularly scooped up communications of citizens of countries around the world, including friendly ones.

    Another recommendation would create 2/ the post of advocate for privacy issues, who would argue before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court now approves surveillance requests based only on arguments from the government’s perspective .

    Mr. Obama proposed such a change himself in August. Details of the post are still being fleshed out.

    3/ A key reform proposal is the restructuring of the phone-data program. Currently, the NSA collects all the data and houses it in its database. The review panel had said the data should be held by the phone companies or a third party, not by the NSA.

    “It is absolutely being seriously considered,” the senior administration official said of the proposal. “We are studying it really carefully and hope that we’ll have a decision that the president can announce on how we want to move forward on that.”

    The scope of the eventual NSA overhaul, however, will depend on what the president decides on other key proposals.

    4/T he review panel recommended that U.S. phone data only be searched with the approval of a court. Currently, NSA searches are based on a standard it calls “reasonable, articulable suspicion,” which is determined internally.