NSA mass phone data collection illegal: government watchdog
24 Jan 2014
A government watchdog yesterday said that the Security Agency's (NSA) mass collection of phone records was illegal and needed to be shut down.
According to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board set up by Congress in 2007, the programme exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had ''minimal'' benefits for national security.
It went on to claim that there was no legal basis for the bulk collection of telephone records and concluded: ''We believe the program must be ended.''
''We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,'' the board said in the report which runs into 238-pages.
The report calls even stricter oversight measures than last month's report from a panel appointed by president Barack Obama which called for moving bulk data out of the hands of the government and requiring communication providers or a third party to hold the data.
In a series of recommendations, it urged the government to delete data sooner and limit access to call records of people, who were more than two degrees – and not three – from a suspect.
Meanwhile, the White House yesterday disputed the findings of the review board that the data collection programme was illegal.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said, the administration simply disagreed with board's analysis on the programme's legality.
Carney claimed the president, in his address last week, did "directly derive" some of his ideas from the board's draft recommendations, but clarified that Obama did not agree with their stance on the legitimacy of mass phone record collection.
He said the administration believed that the programme was lawful.
According to commentators, though the findings could be used as leverage in federal lawsuits against NSA spying.
The report concluded that the programme raised "constitutional concerns" regarding the US citizens' rights of speech, association and privacy.
.webp)
