President Obama Drops His Promise To Take Phone Metadata Away From NSA... But Perhaps That's Fine [Updated]

from the so-much-for-reform dept

President Barack Obama's administration has quietly abandoned a proposal it had been considering to put raw U.S. telephone call data collected by the National Security Agency under non-governmental control, several U.S. security officials said....



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The Obama administration has decided, however, that the option of having a private third party collect and retain the telephone metadata is unworkable for both legal and practical reasons. "I think that's accurate for right now," a senior U.S. security official said.

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. In short, the only thing that was dropped was the bad idea of creating some new third party -- and that's an idea that most had assumed was dropped months ago for being nonsensical. We apologize for being misleading and not digging deep enough to understand the details. Original post belowAs you may recall, about a year ago, President Obama gave a speech pledging some fairly weak NSA reforms in response to the Snowden revelations. There were some good things proposed, but he could have gone much further. One specific promise: the NSA would stop hoarding metadata on every phone call. As he said, it was time to "transition away" from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect all those phone calls for the NSA to snoop through. Of course, he left the details up to Congress. And, Congress, in true Congress-like fashion, completely dropped the ball and failed to approve any of the proposed legislative changes that would have ended the metadata collection program.So, President Obama is giving up. He apparently is breaking his promise to take the metadata away from the NSA It is neither unworkable for legal nor practical reasons. It's only unworkable because ofin that Congress couldn't get its act together to bar the practice.Furthermore, if President Obama hadactually been serious about ending the program, he could have easily done it himself . That's because his administration has to go back to the FISA Court every few months to renew the program -- and he could have simply not had them do so. But, instead, the DOJ has just kept on renewing over and over again since then.And thus, the NSA gets to keep on collecting all that metadata -- unless the courts magically put a stop to itSection 215 isn't renewed by Congress in June of this year...

Filed Under: metadata, nsa, patriot act, president obama, section 215, surveillance