NSA must prove value of phone program: Our view

The Editorial Board | USATODAY

Since fugitive leaker Edward Snowden burst on the scene in June, Americans have learned a lot about all the ways in which their government is watching them. Among the most disturbing:

For seven years, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting detailed phone data on hundreds of millions of Americans not suspected of anything.

The NSA is harvesting millions of e-mail and instant messaging contact lists. Though the program is targeted at foreigners, it sweeps in many ordinary Americans, The Washington Post reported last week .

reported last week . The NSA is building a 1-million-square-foot fortress in Utah to hold a massive collection of data. NSA Director Keith Alexander is bent on sweeping in the whole "haystack to find the needle," while other top intelligence officials talk of needing "all the dots" in order to connect them.

The problem is, they're not really talking about hay or dots. They're talking about collecting massive amounts of data on just about everyone in the United States so the government will have it around in case it's needed.

Until Snowden's revelations made headlines, most lawmakers knew little about these collections. Now Congress is considering whether to curtail or kill the phone records program — the most expansive of the initiatives that have been exposed and a test of where to draw the line between what the government wants and what it actually needs.

In that debate, the burden should be on the NSA to prove that the program's benefits outweigh its costs, which Alexander has struggled to do.

Initially in June, he testified that the phone database, along with a less intrusive e-mail program targeting foreign suspects, had helped disrupt "potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11."

By July, under skeptical questioning by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Alexander's deputy said the phone data "made a contribution" in just 12 cases. And at a symposium in Aspen, when asked how often phone data were the "tip-off" to a plot, Alexander replied: "I don't have the numbers off the top of my head to break it out like that."

Now supporters of the program have fallen back on what-ifs about 9/11. If intelligence agencies had phone metadata before 9/11, they argue, it would have revealed one of the terrorists who was in the U.S. well before the attack. Talk about rewriting history. The tragic flaw before 9/11 was not lack of data but failure to share what agencies already knew.

Even if today's officials are well-intentioned, which they seem to be, the potential that such a resource will be abused is significant, particularly if access to it is one day expanded to the many agencies that would find such tracking useful. The abuses by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover are instructive, as are the political manipulations of Richard Nixon.

A number of lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans, left and right — have criticized this program as too intrusive. Among them are Leahy and conservative Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a key architect of the 2001 law that carved out broad new powers to prevent terrorism. They would end the program. Others would add new protections, such as greater judicial oversight.

Choosing between privacy rights and security from terrorism is difficult. But before Americans are forced to make that choice, the government ought to demonstrate that this intrusive program has extraordinary value. So far, the administration hasn't even come close.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.