Source: Obama Considering Releasing NSA Court Order

by Carrie Johnson

NPR has learned that the Obama administration, under pressure to lift a cloak of secrecy, is considering whether to declassify a court order that gives the National Security Agency the power to gather phone call record information on millions of Americans.

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University of San Francisco law professor Susan Freiwald told the ACS audience that the dragnet phone-data collection program was "quite clearly unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment" and that gaping loopholes in the law, advances in technology and weak oversight by Congress only added to the problem....But FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that under a 1979 ruling in Smith vs. Maryland, the Supreme Court found people have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to phone-call metadata. The information does not include the content of phone calls...The senior administration official told NPR that the phone-call records can be kept only for five years and that the NSA does not use that program to keep data that would allow authorities to track where people are located when they're using their phones. The source said even though the NSA may have that power to collect the geolocation data under the law and the secret court's rulings, the NSA does not use it.

To query the huge pools of metadata, authorities say they need to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of an association with a terrorism organization. That standard is approved by the FISA court but the court does not review each query. Rather, the senior administration official said, the queries are documented and a sample of them is audited by the Justice Department's National Security Division and the Director of National Intelligence.

The official added that the number of people who can perform the searches and the number of people who can review them is limited. And the reasonable suspicion determination must be reauthorized after a certain unspecified period, to prevent searches that could go on forever.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/14/191822828/source-obama-considering-releasing-nsa-court-order