Intelligence leaker Edward Snowden late Tuesday hailed proposed reforms that would provide more privacy safeguards in how the US electronic intelligence organisation collects telephone metadata.
“This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the (National Security Agency) and restore the public’s seat at the table of Government,” Snowden said in a statement, issued from Moscow via the American Civil Liberties Union.
Earlier, US President Barack Obama said he had received a “workable” proposal for intelligence reforms.
Answering reporters’ questions at a summit in the Netherlands, Obama said the proposed changes and new safeguards — which must still be adopted by Congress — would satisfy the main concerns about privacy that have been raised since Snowden’s revelations last year.
The proposal, according to The New York Times , would end the NSA’s systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits and leave the bulk records in the hands of telephone companies.
“It ensures that the Government is not in possession of that bulk data,” said Obama in The Hague.
He did not reveal full details of the proposal.
Obama said the reforms would make sure “that not only is a judge overseeing the overall programme, but also that a judge is looking at each individual inquiry made into a database.” Under the current system, the NSA was given a free hand by a secret court to search the metadata records it had gathered from telephone companies without the need for a judge’s approval for every search.
“I’m confident (the proposal) allows us to do what is necessary about the dangers of a terrorist attack... but does so in a way that addresses some of the concerns that people have raised,” Obama said.
The US President dismissed a reporter’s suggestion that revelations about the NSA’s telephone and Internet surveillance programme by Snowden, a former NSA contractor, had seriously hampered relations with European allies and other countries whose citizens and even leaders had been targeted.
“Any one issue can be an irritant between countries, but it doesn’t define the relationship with those countries,” Obama said.
He said he was “confident” that staff in the US intelligence agencies had the “best intentions and is not snooping into ordinary Dutch, German, French or American” citizens’ lives.
He said there must be a narrowly defined purpose to surveillance, based around “terrorism, counter-proliferation, human trafficking” and other issues that everyone agrees must be pursued.
Snowden said the reforms would be “historic” if still “incomplete.” “President Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programmes, kept secret from the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact unnecessary and should be ended,” Snowden said.
On Wednesday, Snowden supporters including former CIA and FBI officials are to present a petition with 100,000 signatures to the US departments of justice and state, calling for the US to return his passport so he can travel and seek political asylum.
The US has filed charges of espionage against Snowden for stealing classified information. Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.