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Obama pledges greater safeguards for intelligence

President Obama spoke Friday about U.S. intelligence practices, pledging greater judicial review and other safeguards while staunchly defending the National Security Agency.
(Charles Dharapak / Associated Press)
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WASHINGTON — President Obama proposed new safeguards for the government’s vast surveillance of communications in the U.S. and abroad, adding more judicial review and disclosure requirements, but largely leaving in place programs that he said were needed to “remain vigilant in the face of threats.”

In a speech Friday meant to quell concerns about U.S. spy practices, Obama said he recognized the unease many Americans have felt in the seven months since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began to reveal details about the NSA’s activities.

The president pledged greater transparency and acknowledged that leaders could not simply say: “Trust us; we won’t abuse the data we collect.”

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But Obama staunchly defended the nation’s intelligence agencies, saying they had not misused their vast powers in the effort to detect and disrupt terrorist plots.

After repeated reviews, the president said, nothing he had learned “indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.... They are not abusing authority in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails.”

He reminded listeners the country faces “real enemies and threats, and that intelligence serves a vital role in confronting them.”

His proposals drew warm reviews from intelligence officials and expressions of disappointment from many civil liberties activists and some prominent technology company executives.

Under Obama’s plan, the NSA will still have broad authority to intercept email and other Internet communications overseas, even when its dragnet pulls in the communications of Americans who are corresponding with foreigners. Intelligence officials say this power, much more than the telephone database, has been key to counter-terrorism investigations.

He proposed more significant changes for the program that has generated the most public controversy: the government’s database on nearly all telephone calls in the U.S., which shows when calls took place and which numbers are connected to which other numbers.

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Under Obama’s plan, the government would no longer hold the database, but he left undecided who would. Telephone companies have resisted taking on the cost and liability of holding the data themselves, and some prominent members of Congress say that having a private party involved would increase the risk of leaks and other problems.

Obama gave the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence until March 28 to decide who would hold the data. He left unanswered the question of whether the government would continue to collect the data if no solution were found. Officials said that issue had not yet been decided.

In a related decision, Obama surprised some intelligence officials by directing that for now, they must seek a judge’s approval before mining the voluminous cache of records.

The president added that directive to his speech less than a day before delivery, officials said. But that last-minute move was an exception. Most of Obama’s proposals resulted from months of negotiations within the administration and were carefully honed to avoid interfering with the work of the intelligence community.

“We think these are reasonable, moderate steps,” said one senior intelligence official who was involved in negotiations with the White House and asked for anonymity in order to speak freely.

By contrast, civil liberties advocates and officials of technology companies had hoped Obama would go further in curtailing surveillance.

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Obama said nothing about two of the technology industry’s biggest concerns: the government’s efforts to defeat encryption of communications, and its exploitation of so-called back doors that allow access to computer programs. Technology firms worry they may lose business to overseas competitors if customers think they are too susceptible to NSA eavesdropping.

In one move that had been urged by civil liberties groups, Obama said he wanted to set up a panel of privacy advocates who could counter the positions of government lawyers before the special court that oversees intelligence gathering. Currently, the judges hear only from one side of the argument. But the public advocates would be called only in cases involving broad policy issues, not in the majority of proceedings, he said.

Obama sought to reassure a global audience that the NSA would no longer spy on the heads of allied governments, but left open the possibility of such eavesdropping if needed for a “compelling national security purpose.”

He also issued a policy directive ordering intelligence agencies to provide limited new protections for the privacy rights of foreign people.

“People around the world — regardless of their nationality — should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people,” Obama said. And he defended the U.S. against criticism from abroad. Many governments that have criticized U.S. spying do the same or more, he said, calling the debate over surveillance in the U.S. a sign of a healthy democracy.

“No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs, or Russia to take the privacy concerns of citizens into account,” he said.

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The president would let the FBI continue to use so-called national security letters to secretly demand documents from banks, credit card companies and other firms that hold records. But he proposed new rules that in most cases would require the government to eventually tell suspects what information the government sought.

The announcements drew a mixed reaction on Capitol Hill. Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all prominent critics of the NSA, issued a statement praising Obama’s speech as a good first step but quickly moving on to other proposals they wished he had made.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), whose opposition to government surveillance has helped vault him into prominence in his party, said he was “disappointed in the details” of what Obama had proposed. The president’s solution amounts to “the same unconstitutional program with a new configuration,” Paul said.

White House political advisors, however, hope the speech will quiet most public concern outside Washington. On that front, the president may not have that high a bar to reach. Polls have shown that the public disapproves of the NSA’s surveillance activities but that many Americans also consider the work necessary to defeat terrorist plots. Obama does not seem to have paid a significant political price over Snowden’s disclosures.

Privacy advocates and other critics, however, said that if Obama wanted to rebuild confidence at home and abroad, his proposals came up short.

“I doubt people in Germany or Brazil or even the U.S. are going to be satisfied with some new, hard-to-assess checks on how U.S. intelligence uses information, but no change in the fact that the U.S. is collecting information on hundreds of millions of people in the first place,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

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Within the tech sector, advocates expressed dismay at the limits of what Obama proposed.

“We’d hoped for, and the Internet deserves, more,” said Alex Fowler, head of global privacy and public policy for Mozilla. “Without a meaningful change of course, the Internet will continue on its path toward a world of balkanization and distrust, a grave departure from its origins of openness and opportunity.”

A coalition of major technology companies that includes Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter expressed their concern more diplomatically, praising Obama for “positive progress on key issues” including allowing companies to disclose how often they provide data to the government.

But, the coalition said in a statement, “crucial details remain to be addressed” and “additional steps are needed.”

christi.parsons@latimes.com

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

Staff writers Michael A. Memoli in the Washington bureau and Jessica Guynn in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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ional steps are needed.”

christi.parsons@latimes.com

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

Staff writers Michael A. Memoli in the Washington bureau and Jessica Guynn in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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