Just days before President Barack Obama lays out his plans to reform the National Security Agency's
(14 Jan 2014) Members of the presidential task force investigating National Security Agency surveillance practices testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday as President Barack Obama prepared to unveil in a speech Friday to satisfy privacy, legal and civil liberties concerns. In an opening statement, Cass Sunstein from the Review Group of Intelligence and Communication Technologies, said they were focused on maintaining the intelligence community's ability to protect the country. "Not one of the 46 recommendations in our report would, in our view, compromise or jeopardize that ability in any way," he said. The U.S. judiciary Tuesday told Congress it opposes the idea of having an independent privacy advocate on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, while members of Congress lauded the idea at the Capitol Hill hearing. Speaking for the entire U.S. judiciary, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that appointing an independent advocate to the secret surveillance court is unnecessary and possibly counterproductive, and he slammed other key reforms as adding too heavy a caseload to the secret court's work. In current FISC hearings, judges only hear from the government seeking a spy warrant. Sunstein defended the proposal before the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying the secret court should not be making decisions on law or policy without an opposition voice. "We don't think that's consistent with our legal traditions," Sunstein said. Task force members also defended their proposal to shift the government's massive inventory of Americans' phone records from the NSA to telephone companies. When Senator Charles Grassley raised concerns about whether phone companies could safely hold phone metadata, Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, acknowledged that could be a concern. But Stone said the panel concluded there was a much greater threat posed by possible government abuse of the phone data in the future. Keeping the records with the NSA, Stone said, "leaves sitting out there a huge amount of personal information about Americans that could be abused in awful ways." The phone companies don't want the job of storing the records, however. Executives and their lawyers have complained about the plan in confidential meetings with administration officials and key congressional intelligence and other committees, according to interviews by The Associated Press. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: / ap_archive Facebook: / aparchives Instagram: / apnews You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...
