Obama panel urges new limits on NSA spying powers, does not recommend data collection stop

“A panel of presidential advisers who reviewed the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices urged President Obama on Wednesday 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,” Charlie Savage and David E. Sanger report in the New York Times.

The White House released the panel’s 300-page report today. [PDF Link]

The Guardian is liveblogging analysis of the report here.

Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s initial statement:

The President’s Review Group today recognized the severe risks caused by the government’s mass spying on Americans and people around the world, joining the global consensus that the NSA has gone too far. The group’s report included over 40 recommendations for promoting transparency, protecting online security tools, and making organizational reforms to the NSA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the civil liberties oversight bodies. However, the report left open the door for future mass surveillance and failed to address the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass spying, recently questioned by the D.C. federal court and raised by EFF in its multiple lawsuits.

“The president’s panel agreed with the growing consensus that mass electronic surveillance has no place in American society,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said. “The review board floats a number of interesting reform proposals, and we’re especially happy to see them condemn the NSA’s attacks on encryption and other security systems people rely upon. But we’re disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue untargeted spying. Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers.“

“We’re concerned that the panel appears to allows the NSA to continue the mass collection of emails, chats and other electronic communications of Americans under the pretext that the NSA is ‘targeting’ foreigners overseas,” said EFF Activist Trevor Timm. “While we’re happy that the panel acknowledged that foreigners abroad need some additional privacy protections, mass surveillance isn’t acceptable for Americans or foreigners.”