Obama’s NSA reforms ‘window dressing’

US President Barack Obama’s signals for the need to curtail the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of phone records “are mostly window dressing,” a report says.

In an end-of-year press conference before he left for his Hawaii vacation, Obama said he was willing to place control of the collection and storage of Americans’ phone records in the hands of telecom companies.

“It is possible, for example, that some of the same information that the intelligence community feels is required to keep people safe can be obtained by having the private phone companies keep these records longer and to create some mechanism where they can be accessed in an effective fashion,” Obama said Friday.

“That might cost more. There might need to be different checks on how those requests are made. There may be technological solutions that have to be found to do that,” the president added.

In a recent article for the Foreign Policy magazine, Elias Groll argued that Obama was “sending up a trial balloon” with the proposal “as the telecom industry and privacy advocates are less than enthused about it.”

Groll said that telecom companies would be reluctant to “take on responsibility for what would be costly, highly controversial database” and privacy advocates would not be satisfied especially since it would not eliminate the NSA’s surveillance activities.

“That’s likely part of the reason why administration officials are willing to get behind the idea. It provides a highly public fix to a deeply controversial program while at the same time not significantly altering the agency’s intelligence-gathering capabilities. That’s what the White House would call a win-win,” Groll argued.

A panel of experts appointed by President Obama to review US surveillance activities has released a 308-page report which includes 46 reform recommendations, none of which the administration is obliged to undertake.

One of the recommendations by Obama’s experts was that Congress should pass legislation to disallow the NSA to store Americans’ phone records and transfer the responsibility to a private third-party company instead.