(Editor's Note: The following is a guest blog Kevin Bankston, Policy Director Open Technology Institute at New America)
earlier this month, privacy and civil liberties oversight board (PCLOB) released its long awaited report on the monitoring of the national security Agency of the Internet and telephone communications under Article 702 of the FISA amendments to the Act 08.
This is the second report of the independent executive branch agency on monitoring the NSA, following a report in January by the Board recommending an end to bulk collection of NSA phone records under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.
If the latest report of the Council on the bulk collection of phone records was a bomb, this one is a dud. The supervisory authority the Council examined in this report, article 702 of the 08 Act FISA amendments, is in many ways much more worrying that the bulk collection program. As explained by the Commission itself, this law has been used to authorize the tapping of the NSA of the entire Internet backbone, so the NSA can analyze our countless emails and other messages online for information on tens of thousands of targets that the NSA chooses without the approval of individual court. Yet the reforms of the Council now recommends about this awesome power monitoring are much lower than those in their last report, and essentially boil down to suggesting that the government should do more and better paper work and develop protocols stricter domestic as a check against abuse.
In the words of Chief Justice Roberts last week, "the founders did not fight a revolution to get right to the protocols of the government agency," they fought to require search warrants are based on probable cause and to identify precisely who or what can be searched. Yet, as we know from documents published earlier this week, government officials are looking through the data they have acquired in this surveillance authority, an authority that was sold to Congress as being for people outside the United States, tens of thousands of times a year without obtaining a warrant first.
that the Council approved this mandate rummaging through our communications, only weeks after the House of Representatives voted almost three to one to defund the searches of Americans "backdoor" NSA "data is a striking disappointment. The Council is supposed to be an independent watchdog which aggressively seeks to protect our privacy against government overreach, rather than undermine privacy by proposing reforms that are even lower than those of a large bipartisan majority the House has already approved.
We are grateful to the Council his latest report and are grateful to them now for the laying of the clearest and most comprehensive we've seen so far, exactly how the NSA uses its supervisory authority. But Congress should not wait for the NSA to take small set of recommendations of the Commission and get its own house in order. Congress should instead move forward with strong reforms that protect our privacy and that tell the NSA, as the Supreme Court told the government last week :. If you want our data you need to come back with a warrant
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