Perhaps most controversially, the PCLOB gave a qualified endorsement to the NSA's practice of siphoning directly from the Internet information that merely references a surveillance target even if the correspondence is neither from nor sent to that target, a practice known as "about" collection. "We have seen no evidence of a backdoor, so our recommendations are designed to make sure one is not built," Cook said. While Medine and another board member, former federal judge Patricia Wald, wanted to add greater legal protections, the board advocated restricting the FBI's warrantless searches and urged NSA and CIA analysts to certify that their queries are " reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information." "They say if we're collecting everything from Egypt that's not bulk, everything from 202 that's not bulk, everything from that's not bulk, and that's just bullshit," said Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.ĭealing another blow to privacy advocates, the board endorsed the NSA, CIA and FBI's warrantless, so-called "backdoor" searches for information from Americans, just weeks after the House of Representatives voted to ban them. "It's a big program, but it is a targeted program," Medine said after the sparsely-attended Wednesday hearing, which was held in the basement of a Marriott between Congress and the White House.Ĭivil libertarians castigated the PCLOB over what they consider a counterintuitive definition. ![]() The PCLOB denied that the 702 siphoning is bulk collection, even though it annually provides the NSA with "hundreds of millions" of different sorts of communications - blessing an NSA definition that considers only indiscriminate collection, untethered to surveillance targets, to be bulk. ![]() In ways both bold and subtle, the long-awaited report blessed the NSA's large-scale collection of digital data, even as it found elements of it problematic. The scope of the program was revealed through the leaks of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.While PCLOB chairman David Medine said those efforts walked "right up to the line of constitutionality," the report largely vindicated the controversial surveillance, the scope of which was disclosed through reporting on documents provided by Edward Snowden, as both effective and legal.Įlisebeth Collins Cook, one of five board members and a Justice Department official in the Bush administration, hailed the digital surveillance as "legal, valuable and subject to intense oversight," and characterized the PCLOB's recommendations as "relatively slight changes at the margins of the program." Section 702 was meant to apply only to non-U.S. Rajesh De said the value of surveillance could not be judged by how many plots a single program may have stopped. Senior government officials in the first panel said the government was conducting lawful surveillance of foreign persons abroad under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). ![]() T09:04:54-04:00 The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board held a hearing on the section 702 portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that gives the government the authority to conduct surveillance overseas.
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