[Infowarrior] - Snooping reports' pileup problem

[Richard Forno]

Snooping reports' pileup problem
By: Josh Gerstein
May 2, 2014 05:08 AM EDT
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=35E6316C-8A8E-4B52-81FA-9E01A541F954

Could surveillance reform succumb to death by a thousand blue-ribbon panels?

That’s what some are fearing as bookshelves in congressional offices, lobbying suites and newsrooms across Washington begin to sag with the accumulation of snooping-related reports and recommendations unveiled since Edward Snowden’s stunning disclosures last June about widespread National Security Agency gathering of U.S. telephone data.

The White House added two more studies to the growing stack Thursday: assessments of the risks and dangers inherent in collection and mining of so-called “big data” by both government and the private sector. One writeup came from Obama advisers and Cabinet officials like counselor John Podesta, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Another came from a 20-member council of outside experts on technology issues.

The teeming pile of reports stands in contrast to the few tangible signs of legislative progress on many of the issues the various boards have focused on. That disconnect is fueling concerns in some quarters that there’s plenty of diagnosing going on and, so far, little in the way of treatment.

“Reports will not be enough,” warned Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union. “I don’t think people are going to accept reports when we’re talking about what are obvious violations of people’s privacy…The administration needs to take concrete action to reform America’s privacy laws.”

Some in the technology industry expressed fears that the two reports the White House issued Friday amounted to a kind of rope-a-dope designed to divert public attention from objectionable NSA surveillance by raising concerns about the practices of private businesses.

“Although I welcome the government’s review of this important policy area, it would be a grave error if it is used to attempt to distract attention away from the need for major reform of government surveillance practices that nobody gets to opt out of,” said Ed Black of the Consumer & Communications Industry Association.

“In the runup to the report, the administration continually intertwined the commercial privacy debate with the government surveillance debate,” he said. “Frankly, channeling public outrage over NSA overreach into the debate around commercial privacy regulation is irresponsible.”

“This is only the beginning of a longer discussion,” said Alex Fowler of browser-maker Mozilla. “In the meantime, we strongly urge the Obama administration to stay focused on surveillance reform to help restore trust on the Internet.”

The White House said there was no intent on its part to drain momentum from the drive to pass legislation limiting NSA surveillance.

“The questions are how do you protect privacy across this range of sectors and how one protects privacy in the context of intelligence collection is an extremely important topic,” Podesta told reporters Thursday. “Obviously, we’ve come forward with major reforms of the so-called 215 program, the collection program of telephony data which is essentially about intelligence gathering…It was our task really to look at these other sectors.

“It’s in no way hypocritical for us to come forward as we’re continuing to try to provide basic rights and strong ability to control and audit the way our intelligence authorities are being executed,” Podesta added.

Still, many have doubts about how aggressively President Barack Obama is pushing for NSA reforms. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has said repeatedly in recent weeks that she’s still waiting for the White House to provide legislative language to overhaul the way the government would access the telephone data now gathered by the spy agency.

In any event, there’s little doubt that the just-completed Podesta review was born out of an effort to calm the storm over NSA surveillance. Obama announced the review last spring in the same speech where he addressed the complaints over the spy agency’s practices and endorsed the idea of transitioning from the NSA’s storage of data on U.S. calls to a new system that would likely leave that data with telephone companies.

“The challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone. Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes; that’s how those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your smartphone periodically. But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher,” the president said.

And just days after the first Snowden leaks last June, Obama made clear that he was intent on pulling a discussion of private-sector data-mining into the NSA-focused frenzy

“This is not going to be restricted to government entities,” the president told Charlie Rose back then.

The new Podesta report could also help dampen another headache for the White House: complaints from Europe that the U.S. isn’t serious about implementing privacy protections. The “big data” study was released one day before a scheduled White House visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose complaint about reported NSA surveillance of her mobile phone became an early flashpoint in the controversy.

Merkel has already won an extraordinary public promise from Obama that the U.S. will not intercept her communications in the future. And nothing the Podesta review looked at addressed the question of spying on foreign leaders.

But Merkel and other leaders are eager for signs that the U.S. is moving closer to the European approach of broad regulation of handling of private data by businesses. The new report moves in that direction, while stopping short of laying out specific legislation or a strategy to get it enacted by Congress.

Even with Merkel, the mere passage of time — and the piling of review upon review — has helped calm frayed nerves. Last October, the surveillance issue was so urgent that it prompted Merkel to call Obama directly with her phone-tapping complaints. Now both leaders seem preoccupied with Russia’s threatening moves in Ukraine and how to shield Germany’s economy if one its key sources of energy is interrupted by Russian retaliation for Western sanctions.

The official reports released to date take somewhat different approaches to the surveillance debate, focusing on specific aspects of the issue.

The administration’s new “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values” report now joins the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology’s compendium “Big Data: a Technological Perspective,” the White House-appointed Review Group on Signals Intelligence and Communications Technology’s “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s snazzily-titled “Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

The new Podesta report did not dig deeply into NSA snooping practices, as the earlier panels did. But there is still significant overlap. The “big data” review concludes that current government treatment of so-called metadata may give short shrift to privacy concerns about data that “as a matter of routine can be reassembled to reveal intimate personal details.”

Even the “90-day” study the president ordered Podesta to undertake on big-data issues encountered changes in staffing during the 104 days it was in the works. Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling was billed as a part of the review at its outset. His long-extended tenure at the White House finally ended in February when he was replaced by new economic adviser Jeff Zients, who signed Thursday’s report.

For those who still haven’t had their fill of blue-ribbon studies triggered by the Snowden disclosures, there’s still more on tap.

The Podesta review notes that a fifth panel, Obama’s Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board, has also been tasked with delving into how the intelligence community distinguishes between metadata and other information.

That standing committee once had 14 members, but the lineup was slashed to four by the White House just months before the first Snowden leaks emerged. Its report to Obama is due in a little more than two weeks.

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.


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