President Barack Obama will disclose Friday which surveillance review...
President Barack Obama will disclose Friday which surveillance review group recommendations he will adopt and which he will reject, said Press Secretary Jay Carney. “The president’s been clear throughout this review process that we will not harm our national security…
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or our ability to face global threats.” Carney last Friday pointed to a goal of taking measures that “create more transparency, introduce reforms that improve the system” to give Americans more confidence. Obama has held many meetings on these topics throughout last week, including with top members of Congress Thursday. Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., sent a letter (http://bit.ly/KJZWRt) to the White House Friday demanding Obama adopt certain recommendations from his review group report, released in December. These three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee focused on why the government should end its bulk collection of phone metadata and endorsed the idea of having the government go to the phone companies to seek it out. “Telecom providers generally already hold this information for at least 18 months to comply with FCC regulations, and some companies hold data longer for their own business purposes,” the senators wrote, saying the proposal means companies would not have to hold metadata any longer than they currently do. “Frankly, the NSA has not demonstrated that there is any need to require the telecom providers to hold data for longer than they normally would.” They do not think this would hurt the speed of the government’s accessing metadata or create privacy concerns, they said. They also asked Obama to close a loophole permitting warrantless searches of phone call content and emails in the midst of foreign surveillance as well as create a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court constitutional advocate. Obama can do this now, but they are ready to help by introducing such legislation, they said.