In early August, at the height of a wave of revelations about far-reaching NSA surveillance programs, President Obama promised he would consider reforming some of the NSA's more controversial practices. "It is right to ask questions about surveillance," Obama said at the time.
Four months later, an external task force appointed by the president is about to reveal its proposals. But it's unclear if those will really lead to meaningful reform, as some of those reported proposals have already been ruled out by the White House, just a few hours after they started leaking.
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Anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal the task force would suggest splitting the NSA from Cyber Command, the military's cyberwarfare unit, and that it would recommend what the Journal described as a "sweeping overhaul" of the NSA.
Yet just a few hours later, the White House directly dismissed one of those proposals.
Cyber Command and the NSA will stay together and be headed by the same person, who right now is NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander. Critics consider that dual role counterproductive since the two have conflicting missions: part of the NSA's mission is to break codes, part of the Cyber Command's mission is to defend Internet infrastructure.
"Following a thorough interagency review, the Administration has decided that keeping the positions of NSA Director and Cyber Command Commander together as one, dual-hatted position is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies' missions," Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told Reuters.
Another leaked proposal would change the controversial phone call metadata collection program in which the NSA sweeps up all Americans' phone call records and stores them in a database that can later be queried. The task force, officially named the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, would reportedly suggest imposing "stricter standards" for the NSA to search that data and suggest that data be held by the phone companies or a third party.
But that, critics have pointed out, wouldn't mean the end of the bulk collection.
"Mandating that phone companies or a third party retain years' worth of phone data just in case the government wants to look at it is not an 'overhaul' of or an 'end' to the NSA's bulk collection program, as some reports have described it," said Kevin Bankston, the policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI), and a former civil liberties lawyer. "It’s just bulk collection by proxy."
For Sascha Meinrath, OTI's director, who also advised the task force, it would be "shameful" if the administration leaves the bulk surveillance program untouched, according to The Guardian.
Even other U.S. officials started criticizing the task force's proposals after the first leaks. One anonymous U.S. official told The Washington Post, "The big picture is there’s not going to be that much [additional] constraint," before adding that "they’re really not hurting [the NSA] that much."
Obama, who has previously said the oversight of the NSA has worked, has had a long history of first criticizing and then embracing the NSA's surveillance programs, as The New Yorker reported this week.
The task force's report is due on Sunday, and it hasn't yet been submitted to the White House. The administration's own review, on the other hand, is planned by the end of the month.
In an interview on MSNBC last week, Obama said: "I’ll be proposing some self-restraint on the N.S.A., and, you know, to initiate some reforms that can give people more confidence," but he wouldn't provide any more details.
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