Report said to urge new restraints on NSA

WASHINGTON - A presidential advisory committee that examined the operations of the National Security Agency has concluded that a program to collect data on every phone call made in the United States should continue, although under broad new restraints that would be designed to increase privacy protections, officials with knowledge of the report’s contents said.

The committee’s report, the officials said, also argues in favor of codifying and publicly announcing the steps the United States will take to protect the privacy of foreigners whose telephone records, Internet communications or movements are collected by the National Security Agency. Intelligence officials have argued strenuously that they should be under few restrictions when tapping the communications of non-Americans abroad, who do not have constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment.

The advisory group also is expected to recommend that senior White House officials, including the president, directly review the list of foreign leaders whose communications are routinely monitored by the National Security Agency. President Barack Obama has apologized to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for the monitoring of her calls during the past decade, promising that the actions had been halted and would not resume. But he refused to make the same promise to the leaders of Mexico and Brazil.

Administration officials said the White House already has taken over supervision of that program.

“We’re not leaving it to Jim Clapper anymore,” said one official, referring to the director of national intelligence, who appears to have been the highest official to regularly review the programs.

Resistance from the intelligence agencies is likely.In an interview two months ago, Gen. Keith Alexander, the soon-to-retire director of the National Security Agency and the commander of the military’s Cyber Command, suggested that a major cutback in U.S. spying on foreigners would be naive. And officials who have examined the agency’s programs said they have been surprised at how infrequently the agency has been challenged to weigh the intelligence benefits of its foreign collection operations against the damage that could be done if the programs were exposed.

One of the expected recommendations is that the White House conduct a regular review of those collection activities, the way covert action by the CIA is reviewed annually.

Another likely recommendation, officials said, is the creation of an organization of legal advocates who, like public defenders, would argue against lawyers for the National Security Agency and other government organizations in front of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the nation’s secret court that oversees the collection of telephone and Internet “metadata” and wiretapping aimed at terrorism and espionage suspects.

Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokesman, declined to discuss any specific recommendations of the panel.

“Our review is looking across the board at our intelligence gathering to ensure that as we gather intelligence, we are properly accounting for both the security of our citizens and our allies, and the privacy concerns shared by Americans and citizens around the world,” she said. “We need to ensure that our intelligence resources are most effectively supporting our foreign policy and national security objectives - that we are more effectively weighing the risks and rewards of our activities.”

She added that the review was especially focused on “examining whether we have the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state; how we coordinate with our closest allies and partners; and what further guiding principles or constraints might be appropriate for our efforts.”

The five-person advisory group of intelligence and legal experts, several of whom have longtime connections to Obama, is expected to deliver its lengthy, unclassified report to the White House by this weekend. Among its members are Richard Clarke, who served in the Clinton administration and both Bush administrations and has become an expert on cyberconflict; Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA; and Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the Obama White House and is married to Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations.

Two leading legal academics are also members: Peter Swire, an expert in privacy law, and Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional-law expert and a former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama once taught.

Members of the advisory group have declined to talk about their recommendations until the report is published.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt and Charlie Savage of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 3 on 12/13/2013

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