WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s plan to afford citizens of countries allied with the U.S. the same privacy protections as Americans in what data is collected about them through government surveillance was surprising to at least one member of the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.
Peter Swire, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was one of five experts asked by Obama in August 2013 to advise the administration on how to use data collection technology in a way that protects U.S. national security while respecting civil liberties in light of the revelations of massive data collection by the National Security Agency of Americans’ telephone records. The review group announced 46 recommendations in December 2013.
On Wednesday, Jan. 29, Swire said Swire said he was surprised by the president’s statement in his Jan. 17 speech that stricter rules would be in place for the surveillance of citizens of U.S. ally countries. He said the president’s plans would treat the citizens of other countries similarly to U.S. citizens during the course of CIA or NSA intelligence reviews.
“Instead of only being citizens of the country and then a sort of free-fire zone to spy on the rest of the world, which is the way spying has always been done, the president has taken on for the U.S. quite strong directives to build privacy and civil liberties into the integral structure of the intelligence community,” Swire said.
The recommendations include keeping telephone metadata in the hands of a private company or a third party entity, increased company transparency about government requests for information and having a judge (rather than a National Security Agency official) check for reasonable suspicion before the government searches for a person’s information.
“They’ve informed us that something like 70 percent of the recommendations out of 46 they’ve taken in either letter or spirit,” he said. “I think they took this extremely seriously.”
Swire also discussed the recommendations Obama has decided not to follow, such as a restructuring of the NSA to separate its defensive and offensive aspects.
“In our group we were concerned that the NSA structurally could be getting too many jobs in one place without proper checks and balances,” he said.
