http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37174.htm
NSA Program Stopped No Terror Attacks, Says White House Panel Member
By Michael Isikoff
December 20, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "NBC News" - A member
of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was
"absolutely" surprised when he discovered the agency's lack of
evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had
thwarted any terrorist attacks.
"It was, 'Huh, hello? What are we doing here?'" said Geoffrey Stone,
a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News.
"The results were very thin."
While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a
"logical program" from the NSA's perspective, one question the White
House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped
"any [terror attacks] that might have been really big."
"We found none," said Stone.
Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward
Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and
duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.
Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel - and
the only one without any intelligence community experience - that
this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA's
collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans'
privacy rights.
The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program
was "not essential in preventing attacks."
"That was stunning. That was the ballgame," said one congressional
intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. "It
flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us."
Despite the panel's conclusions, Stone strongly rejected the idea
they justified Snowden's actions in leaking the NSA documents about
the phone collection. "Suppose someone decides we need gun control
and they go out and kill 15 kids and then a state enacts gun
control?" Stone said, using an analogy he acknowledged was "somewhat
inflammatory." What Snowden did, Stone said, was put the country "at
risk."
"My emphatic view," he said, "is that a person who has access to
classified information -- the revelation of which could damage
national security -- should never take it upon himself to reveal that
information."
Stone added, however, that he would not necessarily reject granting
an amnesty to Snowden in exchange for the return of all his
documents, as was recently suggested by a top NSA official. "It's a
hostage situation," said Stone. Deciding whether to negotiate with
him to get all his documents back was a "pragmatic judgment. I see no
principled reason not to do that."
The conclusions of the panel's reports were at direct odds with
public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence
officials. "Lives have been saved," Obama told reporters last June,
referring to the bulk collection program and another program that
intercepts communications overseas. "We know of at least 50 threats
that have been averted because of this information."
But in one little-noticed footnote in its report, the White House
panel said the telephone records collection program - known as
Section 215, based on the provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that
provided the legal basis for it - had made "only a modest
contribution to the nation's security." The report said that "there
has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the
outcome [of a terror investigation] would have been any different"
without the program.
The panel's findings echoed that of U.S. Judge Richard Leon, who in a
ruling this week found the bulk collection program to be
unconstitutional. Leon said that government officials were unable to
cite "a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk
collection metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack,
or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was
time-sensitive in nature."
Stone declined to comment on the accuracy of public statements by
U.S. intelligence officials about the telephone collection program,
but said that when they referred to successes they seemed to be
mixing the results of domestic metadata collection with the
intelligence derived from the separate, and less controversial, NSA
program, known as 702, to intercept communications overseas.
The comparison between 702 overseas interceptions and 215 bulk
metadata collection was "night and day," said Stone. "With 702, the
record is very impressive. It's no doubt the nation is safer and
spared potential attacks because of 702. There was nothing like that
for 215. We asked the question and they [the NSA] gave us the data.
They were very straight about it."
He also said one reason the telephone records program is not
effective is because, contrary to the claims of critics, it actually
does not collect a record of every American's phone call. Although
the NSA does collect metadata from major telecommunications carriers
such as Verizon and AT&T, there are many smaller carriers from which
it collects nothing. Asked if the NSA was collecting the records of
75 percent of phone calls, an estimate that has been used in
briefings to Congress , Stone said the real number was classified but
"not anything close to that" and far lower.
When panel members asked NSA officials why they didn't expand the
program to include smaller carriers, the answer they gave was
"money," Stone said. "They were setting financial priorities," said
Stone, and that was "really revealing" about how useful the bulk
collection of telephone calls really was.
An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment on any aspect of the panel's
report, saying the agency was deferring to the White House. Asked
Wednesday about the surveillance panel's conclusions about telephone
record collection, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that
"the president does still believe and knows that this program is an
important piece of the overall efforts that we engage in to combat
threats against the lives of American citizens and threats to our
overall national security."
© 2013 NBCNews.com
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