The Obama administration has drafted a new law altering the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance phone records program. If enacted by Congress, it would require a court order to obtain specific records. (The New York Times, March 24, 2014, by Charlie Savage)
The proposal to end mass surveillance comes after public protests in favor of privacy prompted by the Snowden leaks. Under the law, phone companies would retain possession of records, only relinquishing them under an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). (National Journal, March 25, 2014, by Dustin Volz)
Stewart Baker arges in The Volokh Conspiracy, March 25, 2014, that involving the FISC in each request for phone data will delay the process, unduely hampering NSA. “…there is at least some reason to worry that the administration is going to inject the court into every request for data from the carriers. I hope not, because that would be completely unworkable. Remember, in the new system, all the data remains with the phone companies, so assembling one suspicious character’s social graph means first assembling a list of all the people he calls, which is easy — just serve his phone company with the request — and then assembling a list of his contacts’ contacts. That’s the second hop. To collect second-hop records means obtaining records from every carrier whose customers showed up on the first hop. Right now, NSA can move from the first hop to the second with the click of a mouse. But under the proposed new system, every hop requires a batch of new subpoenas to a batch of carriers. That’s going to slow the process quite a bit. Adding the courts to the process, though, will turn it into a morass,” writes Baker.