One of the spy reforms being considered by the White House would see private phone companies instead of the National Security Agency storing bulk phone data used in protecting the US from terrorist attacks and other crimes.
But as US President Barack Obama prepares to announce the NSA reforms on Friday, scepticism was increasing within the telephone industry about that possibility.
And there were growing questions about whether NSA’s bulk telephone data collection is even necessary to combat terrorism.
Obama in December appeared to agree with recommendations from his Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies that private phone companies could take over the storage role, with the data made accessible to the government.
The move would reassure the public that the information is not in government hands, but could be costly, he noted.
“It is possible ... that some of the same information that the intelligence community feels is required to keep people safe can be obtained by having the private phone companies keep these records longer and to create some mechanism where they can be accessed in an effective fashion,” Obama said.
Scepticism within telephone industry
Leaders of the wireless phone industry, however, question the wisdom.
“Our members would oppose the imposition of data retention obligations that would require them to maintain customer data for longer than necessary,” said Jot Carpenter, a vice president at the industry group CTIA – The Wireless Association, on Tuesday.
The NSA holds the bulk telephone data for at least five years, while private industry hangs on to data for much shorter times, usually less than two years, according to some reports.
Yet if the firms took on the burden from the NSA, the data would have to be “provided or kept in a way that allows it to be integrated” and analysed by the NSA, said Rajesh De, general counsel for NSA during a public hearing in November of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – an independent panel set up in 2004 to oversee privacy concerns in the war on terrorism.
In addition to provoking privacy concerns at home, the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about US telephone and internet snooping sent outrage around the world.
The files leaked to the press showed the US was spying on leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and on communications of private citizens worldwide – issues which are not at the top of Washington’s agenda, although Obama has admitted they need attention.
Defusing terrorist attacks
Of equal interest to critics of NSA’s programme is the suggestion that the information may not even be very useful in defusing attacks.
Obama’s own review group admitted in December that the information from mass telephone data used in investigations “was not essential to preventing attacks, and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.” That finding was supported in a report, Do NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?, released this week by the New America Foundation, a non-profit bipartisan think tank.
The answer, they concluded, was “no.” The authors analysed the cases of 227 individuals charged in the US with an act of terrorism since the 2001 attacks. The suspects were all recruited by al-Qaeda or like-minded groups.
The study showed that NSA’s bulk collection of telephone data only contributed to 1.8 per cent of the investigations. Other work by NSA, including surveillance of non-US citizens outside of the US, accounted for 6.2 per cent.
Traditional investigative methods, on the other hand, such as tips from informants and local residents and specific intelligence operations accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the charges.
“Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group,” the report said.
The authors conceded, however, that in 28 per cent of the cases, involving 62 individuals, it was not clear how the cases were brought to justice. It was possible that NSA surveillance of some kind was involved, although in 23 of the cases an informant played a role.
In the weeks after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began making revelations in June, NSA director General Keith Alexander told Congress that NSA programmes had provided “critical leads to help prevent more than 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.”