NSA proposals need greater public debate


Last Friday, President Obama delivered a widely publicized   speech on NSA reform, according to the Los Angeles Times. Though the proposed ways to swiftly revamp the intelligence agency are, in principle, a positive step toward transparency, few offer truly workable, effective solutions. In moving forward, conversation should be opened to public debate.

Design by Julien Nicolai

Design by Julien Nicolai

Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSA has been collecting telephone records of Americans. According to the Washington Post, the NSA collects billions of records daily on Americans’ phone calls for the purpose of mapping links among terrorism suspects.

In addressing privacy concerns, President Obama said in his speech, “We will reform programs and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

The spirit of change for the better seems to resonate with those words. Though it’s true that national security is paramount, surveillance activities such as the bulk collection of this “metadata” need reform. The cloak of secrecy that the agency works under is understandable, but when the program involves such personal information as phone calls to keep records — even if it isn’t call content — the matter should be put up for debate and scrutinized by the public eye.

Though President Obama’s approach to NSA concerns seems fairly progressive, the reforms proposed seem to be more talk than substance. Besides strengthening executive branch oversight and adding restrictions on the government’s ability to investigate communication between Americans and foreign citizens, President Obama still intends to preserve the government’s capability to use the records, only narrowing access with a transition of the bulk collection to a third party. But at face value, that doesn’t really mean much. If anything, it would raise more concerns on the reliability of that third party.

Perhaps the solution is to get rid of the program completely. The proposal seems far-fetched, but looking at the actual effectiveness of the program, scrapping it starts to seem reasonable. In a federal ruling last December that declared the collection of metadata unconstitutional, Judge Richard Leon stated, “The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”

The Obama administration has cited 54 terrorist plots by the NSA’s phone call database. Last June, however, when Senator Patrick Leahy questioned NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander on whether only 13 of the 54 cases had any connection at all to the United States, Gen. Alexander admitted that it was true. Perhaps the success and effectiveness of the program has been made to seem like something it really isn’t.

Yet what is certain is that while the spirit of reform is alive and well in President Obama’s address, the actual substance is absent. The President’s new plan has yet to be tested by vigorous public debate. It still lacks the most important factor: the input of the American people.

 

Valerie Yu is a sophomore majoring in biological sciences and English. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Fridays.