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Stone: White House viewed surveillance report as 'liberal'

A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”

“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.

Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”

Obama last week did endorse some of the key findings of the White House-chartered panel, including shifting storage of bulk phone records out of the government’s hands and into the private sector — to telecommunications companies or a third-party organization.

“We were pleased with that,” Stone said.

But Stone noted that Obama also rejected the task force’s call for judicial approval for National Security Letters, administrative subpoenas used by the FBI to gather information from telecom companies, Internet firms and other businesses.

“The president set forth a framework at the 100,000-foot level, which is reasonable and appropriate,” Stone said. “But it’s all in the details.”

With NSA supporters on Capitol Hill lining up against some of the task force’s major reform proposals, Stone noted, “I think it’s extremely important that push back continue on the other side of the equation and the White House’s feet be held to the fire on these issues.”

“My sense is there are people in the White House who are very sympathetic to this and there are people in the White House who are less sympathetic to this and the public discourse will play a significant role in how this plays out as we move forward,” he said.