Review Panel Recommends New Limits on NSA Spying

A panel of presidential advisers who reviewed the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices urged President Barack Obama to end the government’s systematic collection of logs of all Americans’ phone calls, and to keep those in private hands, “for queries and data mining” only by court order.

In a more than 300-page report made public by the White House, the group of five intelligence and legal experts also strongly recommended that any operation to spy on foreign leaders would have to pass a rigorous test that weighs the potential economic or diplomatic costs if the operation becomes public. The decision to monitor those communications, it said, should be made by the president and his advisers, not the intelligence agencies. It also recommends new limits on surveillance of ordinary non-Americans. It argues for applying to foreign targets of intelligence the protections accorded to Americans under the Privacy Act of 1974, meaning the government could release very little information about them. The panel also declared that the NSA should cease efforts to undermine work to create secure encryption standards to protect confidential communications and data stored on remote “cloud” servers, and make clear that “it will not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption.” It also said the United States should get out of the business of secretly collecting flaws in common computer programs and using them for mounting cyberattacks, because the technique undermines confidence in American products. That technique, using what are called “zero day” flaws that have never been discovered before, were critical to the cyberattacks that the United States and Israel launched on Iran in an effort to slow its nuclear program. Taken together, the recommendations would remove from the NSA's hands the authority to conduct many of its operations without review by the president, Congress or the courts. But by themselves, they would terminate few programs.