The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) used Black Friday to announce what it won’t be collecting any more – bulk telephone data as it had been collected under the USA Patriot Act.
President Obama announced an end to the program nearly a year earlier, during a speech at the Department of Justice in January 2014. The USA Freedom Act of 2015 was passed on June 2. Pursuant to that new legislation, bulk data collection in theory is a thing of the past – but that doesn’t mean the government doesn’t still have options for obtaining telephone records. The cusp of the new legislation is that records remain with the phone companies, and individual orders must be obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The past several months have been a transition period between the Patriot Act and implementation of the Freedom Act, but as of this weekend the government is now prohibited from collecting bulk telephone records for either US or non-US citizens. Rather than a situation of ‘collect first and clarify later,’ the government is now required to specifically identify a person, account or device prior to collecting data from the phone companies.
A More Transparent IC in Challenging Times
As the terror landscape heightens, this is just one more step the IC is making to become more transparent. In October, ODNI released the ‘Principles of Intelligence Transparency for the Intelligence Community.’
“We believe transparency is worth the cost,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during a speech at George Washington University, in Washington, DC on October 27.
“Because if the American people don’t understand what we are doing, why it’s important and how we’re protecting their privacy and civil liberties, we will lose their confidence and that will affect our ability to perform our mission – which ultimately serves them.”
While the transparency plan is more ideological than practical, it presents a few points that may be significant in the months to come. Specifically, it calls on agencies to “consider the public interest” when making classification determinations. It also instructs intelligence agencies to release substantive (but unclassified) intelligence data to the public. This is the opposite of the posture the intelligence community has taken toward open source intelligence in the past.
