Wall Street Journal - Disarming Surveillance lyrics

'Gentlemen do not read each others' mail." That was Secretary of State Henry Stimson's immortal logic for closing the Cipher Bureau in 1929 and depriving the U.S. of the capacity to read foreign diplomatic cables as world-wide threats grew. The danger now is that President Obama, Congress or both will shift to a comparably blinkered strategy on antiterror surveillance—and for no better reason than Stimson's. Amid the deluge of Edward Snowden intelligence disclosures, Mr. Obama appointed a five-member panel to review the National Security Agency's methods and the balance between security and privacy. The panel recently sent a draft report to the White House, and a version is expected to be made public next month. But the word on Capitol Hill is that the scope and radicalism of the recommendations stunned even this White House, not least because the task force was stacked with Obama loyalists. If the details are anything like the leaks, then the panel is advising the government to seriously degrade U.S. counterterror defenses and shut down several valuable surveillance a**ets in a dangerous world. • Bulk metadata collection. One of the worst proposals would effectively cripple the NSA's ability to collect, store and an*lyze telephony records, or the time, duration and originating and terminating numbers for phone calls. This program was authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act and collects a vast amount of information, even if the database is only searched narrowly on the basis of specific facts as approved by judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC. The minimization procedures are strict enough that the NSA only used the 215 program to make 300 queries in 2012. The panel would prohibit the NSA from collecting metadata and instead require telecom providers to retain their own records for the phone calls placed on their networks. The NSA would need to make Section 215 requests individually to each carrier. The problem is that metadata is only useful if it is pooled, formatted and organized so it can be searched quickly and accurately. Intelligence is not an on-demand technology but an ongoing, painstaking process in preparation for questions that no one can know until U.S. spooks need immediate answers. Say the CIA station chief in Yemen acquires a phone number and wants to know who the target was calling in the U.S. The FISC would still likely approve the query. But instead of keeping the data in one place under a collection-first policy, the NSA would need to turn to the telecom companies one by one, including foreign companies that operate inside the U.S. The NSA would then need to aggregate the links to the original number from scratch, potentially missing the "hops" when a person of interest receiving a call dials someone else. This is a great way to overlook a terror cell inside the U.S. Any potential risks to privacy are the same, so there's no extra protection against abuse. Personal information may be even less secure if not housed at the data farms NSA built specifically for that purpose. The delays and intentional inefficiencies, however, will make metadata far less effective in practice. • Foreign-to-foreign intercepts. The panel attempts to quell the European uproar over purely foreign surveillance by the U.S. by suggesting some kind of agreed-upon code of conduct among allied intelligence agencies. The target here is the President's core constitutional power for warrantless overseas wiretapping, also authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Put aside the hypocrisy of the foreign leaders who have looser limits on domestic surveillance than the U.S. complaining about spying when they also spy on the U.S. The U.S. has good reasons to surveil even close allies whose interests are never perfectly in sync with ours. The European Union is now threatening to blow up the Swift antiterror finance program, while the 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg. Any kind of agreement on universal sharing or international information norms that are meant to exempt countries from U.S. surveillance and scale back overseas collection makes the NSA more dependent on its European counterparts. Their mistake becomes our dirty bomb explosion. Any binding enforcement mechanisms short of a treaty approved by the Senate is unconstitutional, and in any case subjecting U.S. spycraft to foreign approval is preposterous for a nation serious about defending itself. • A more adversarial FISC process. The FISC judges are not now operating as a judiciary but instead fill a quasi-legal management role over NSA. This dilutes accountability for the political branches, but the Obama panel wants to go further and appoint a public advocate whose job is to argue against the NSA as in a public lawsuit. This roving ACLU corps would second-guess the agency and presumably urge the judges to reject or limit NSA requests. But as we have learned from the Snowden dossier and the documents the NSA has decla**ified in response, the FISC already sees its role less an a neutral arbiter and more as an opponent of the government. The court is now disclosing how many times it forces the NSA to charge its orders or procedures, as if that reveals anything of substance. Introducing another layer of opposition inevitably means fewer approvals and even less accountability. Speaking of which, the Director of National Intelligence post currently filled by James Clapper was designed post-9/11 to integrate the intelligence silos and focus national security responsibilities in the White House. He is a Presidential appointee. But now a senior Administration official tells the New York Times NYT +0.86% without attribution that the panel report means "We're not leaving it to Jim Clapper anymore." If so, Mr. Clapper should be fired for not being up to the job. Mr. Obama seems to view the NSA as some independent operation running on autopilot, but the programs that keep the country safe are his responsibility. In that sense his panel choices were a fiasco waiting to happen. Task force member Ca** Sunstein is a noted economist but the Harvard professor is hardly an expert in technology or intelligence law. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone was a prominent critic of antiterror surveillance during the George W. Bush years. The report lands at a bad political moment, with tea party Republicans and anti-antiterror Democrats smelling opportunity and sociopaths with stolen documents campaigning to harm U.S. national security. Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled Monday that phone metadata collection is unconstitutional, part of a larger post-Snowden legal a**ault. Now Mr. Obama's own commission wants to introduce more obstacles to the surveillance that is America's main remaining advantage over terror networks. If Mr. Obama won't toss the report, grownups in Congress should do it for him.