Digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said the proposed reforms were “anemic,” and would do little to stop excessive surveillance. “The government’s collection and search of Americans’ communications without a warrant or individually approved court order is barred by the Constitution and must be stopped,” it added.
Disclosures of US overseas surveillance, including of spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazil President Dilma Rousseff, have created controversy abroad. Some US companies like Microsoft and Cisco Systems have said that the surveillance could lead to customers turning away from US vendors of products and cloud services for fear of being spied on. The German government last week dropped Verizon Communications as a service provider over concerns about US spying.
The PCLOB did not address the implications abroad of NSA surveillance, concluding that the core of the Section 702 programme, consisting of acquiring the communications of specifically targeted foreign persons located outside the US, was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. The board described foreign operations under Section 702 as having “proven valuable in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism as well as in other areas of foreign intelligence.”
Reviewing the government’s programs for the bulk collection of phone records of US persons, the PCLOB earlier this year said that the NSA lacked the legal authority for such collection, and recommended in a 3-2 vote that the government wind down the program. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed in June last year details of the bulk collection of phone records from Verizon by the NSA.
“If the last PCLOB report was a bombshell, this one is a dud,” wrote Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, in a Twitter message.
John Ribeiro, IDG News Service
Ltd
