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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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White House to keep NSA, cyber oversight together

Government says that's most effective way to get job done

The Columbian
Published:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and cyber command operations under the direction of a single military commander, officials said Friday, the same day a review board sent the White House more than 40 recommendations on intelligence collection and government spying.

The White House did not make the task force’s report public. Published reports Friday described the recommendations as limited in scope.

Following revelations this summer about sweeping phone and Internet data collection in the U.S. and around the world, the administration had considered splitting oversight of the NSA and the military’s Cyber Command unit. But National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Friday the government believes that maintaining the oversight responsibilities together under one command is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies’ missions.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, currently oversees both the agency’s surveillance operations and Cyber Command, which monitors and responds to computer intrusions and espionage. Alexander is expected to step down this spring. The administration’s decision means he will be replaced by another senior military commander instead of a civilian director, as recommended by some national security experts.

Later Friday, the White House said the review group working under the Director of National Intelligence delivered its findings on NSA surveillance to President Barack Obama. The DNI’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology held no public meetings and met several times with business and privacy groups out of the range of the media and public. DNI head James Clapper exempted the panel from standard federal requirements that it work transparently.

The White House is reviewing the task force recommendations and finalizing its own internal study, Hayden said. She said the process was expected to be finished in January, after which Obama would speak publicly on any changes to the government’s intelligence gathering and surveillance. The review board report is also expected to be made public after that point.

Although the task force has kept its recommendations secret, news organizations have sketched out proposals that would allow most of the NSA’s surveillance programs to continue but change ownership of the government’s large inventory of telephone records and restrict spying on allied nations. The Wall Street Journal reported that the panel proposed shifting control of sought-after phone records from the government to individual phone companies, while The New York Times said the panel urged the White House to hold a tighter leash on U.S. spying on foreign leaders.

The panel’s recommendations come as skepticism over the NSA surveillance mounts in Congress and from technology companies and privacy groups. Worried that reports of foreign data intercepts could drive away international customers, lawyers for a consortium of tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo recently urged legal changes in Congress. Their move coincided with a bipartisan legislative push to scale back the surveillance programs.

One lawmaker said the review panel recommendations could aid plans to end the government’s direct control over telephone data.

“I’d encourage the administration to move in the direction of phone companies’ retaining the data,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Ca., said Friday.

Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has offered legislation to shift control of phone records from the NSA to the phone companies and said the move could be made without diminishing national security. He noted that the firms already hold the same data that the government sweeps up and could quickly turn over that material to the NSA and law enforcement. NSA officials have warned that investigations could bog down if the government lost direct control over the records.

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