US government privacy board says NSA bulk collection of phone data is illegal

President Barack Obama rebuked over his defence of security agency’s gathering of Americans' phone data 

Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington

The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch, issued a report on Thursday that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The recommendations of the five-member board, which were not unanimous, amount to the strongest criticism within the US government yet of the highly controversial surveillance program, first disclosed by the Guardian thanks towhistleblower Edward Snowden. They give fresh support to congressional efforts at ending the practice on Capitol Hill – the main political battleground where the scope of surveillance will be readjusted this year.  

According to the report, first published by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the privacy board found that the mass phone data collection was at best marginally useful for US counter-terrorism, a finding that went further than similar assessments by a federal judge and Obama’s own surveillance advisory board.

Not only did the PCLOB conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.

“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”  

The PCLOB tacitly rejected the NSA’s public claim that the bulk phone records collection may have made the difference in stopping a terrorist plot connected to cab drivers in San Diego – a rare case in which a government review body has specifically refuted the NSA’s aggressive post-Snowden PR campaign.

“We believe that in only one instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in planning a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program,” it found.

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/23/nsa-barack-obama-phone-data-collection-illegal-privacy-board