WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s planned reforms for the National Security Agency’s data collection and surveillance may not be enough to protect Americans’ privacy, several First Amendment experts said during a panel discussion, while veteran journalists worried that the government’s surveillance is hindering reporters’ ability to cover national security issues.
The group of journalism, legal and technology experts discussed the report from the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which included 46 recommendations to reform government surveillance practices; Obama’s speech outlining his plans for reform; and a report released the day before by the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that called the NSA telephone data collection program illegal.
University of Chicago Professor Geoffrey Stone, a panelist, First Amendment scholar and member of the president’s Review Group, said the five-member group’s recommendations were unanimous.
→ Highlights reel from the panel, bottom of this page.
“We feel very strongly that the recommendations we put forth are sound,” Stone said at the panel discussion, held Jan. 24 at the National Press Club in Washington and sponsored by Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Stone said a terrorist attack has not been successfully executed since 9/11 in part because of the work of the intelligence community. However, he said we must “strike the right balance” between protecting the country and civil liberties.
Obama ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way for telephone companies or third parties to store the telephone metadata rather than the NSA, a key recommendation of the Review Group.
But Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute, said that the amount of government surveillance is setting the world on “a very bleak trajectory.”
He predicted that in the future many Americans whose information is gathered as part of the national security efforts in the could be charged with other offenses, part of “mission creep” that can occur if the government has access to huge amounts of personal data.
“As long as we’re collecting all this information, why not also enforce these other laws?” Meinrath said. “I don’t want it [the world] to be one of endless security, where the hardware can’t be trusted.”
Obama said the NSA uses signals intelligence only for “legitimate national security purposes,” but that is a very broad term, according to Karen Kaiser, associate general counsel at the Associated Press for newsroom legal matters. Kaiser said that in a Department of Justice investigation of an AP article, private phone numbers and those of AP bureaus not related to the article were swept up.
Kaiser said such investigations make it hard for journalists to report on national security issues.
“I think we’re seeing a very real threat to journalism,” Kaiser said. “And a need for greater protection.”
Siobhan Gorman, an intelligence correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said journalists need to take steps to protect sources, such as interviewing them in person rather than on the phone to ensure they are not being surveilled.
Gorman reported on the Snowden revelations in 2013 and said that having such documents leaked made the government more accountable.
“It really forces the government hand, when the evidence is black and white,” Gorman said.
Barton Gellman, who broke the NSA story in The Washington Post using information from Edward Snowden along with the Guardian newspaper, said the president left a lot of unanswered questions.
“The president addressed only a small fraction of the discussion of the review group,” Gellman said.
For example, Gellman said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 does not account for recent technological developments and should be revisited.
Highlights from the discussion, below.
