Changes proposed to NSA’s phone surveillance program

Petra Duff

Humanities 8B

Y News

2/13/2014

Changes proposed to NSA’s phone surveillance program

                Following Snowden leaks on the NSA phone bulk phone records, American President Barack Obama made a speech on January 17^th, proposing changes to the phone surveillance program.

                One of the changes was that the query results to metadata was limited to two hops rather than three, meaning that the data of a person who is two steps removed from a suspect can be looked at, bringing it down from three, limiting the amount of data looked at. Also, there is a motion that the data will only be queried after it is found by the court that there is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion”.

                It has also been said by the President that custody of the records may be transferred to a third party outside of the government. However, this plan, as put by David Medine, “just doesn’t seem to address the concerns”.

                “What we need now, though, is not tinkering around the edges but an end to bulk collection,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Washington Legislative Office director Laura W. Murphy. Many are concerned that the changes proposed by the president are mainly surface changes and will do nothing to actually change the situation. Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, says; “This should be seen as an important stopgap measure on the way to legislative reform of the underlying authority. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/obama-to-announce-nsa-reforms-live-coverage)
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/07/obama-administration-starts-to-implement-changes-to-nsa-phone-records-program/)