Recommendation 1
We recommend that section 215 should be amended to authorize
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a section 215 order
compelling a third party to disclose otherwise private information about
particular individuals only if:
- (1) it finds that the government has reasonable grounds to believe
that the particular information sought is relevant to an
authorized investigation intended to protect against
international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and
- (2) like a subpoena, the order is reasonable in focus, scope, and
breadth.
Recommendation 4
We recommend that, as a general rule, and without senior policy
review, the government sh
ould not be permitted to collect and store all
mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to
enable future queries
and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.
Any program involving government collection or storage of such data
must be narrowly tailored to serve an important government interest.
Recommendation 5
We recommend that legislation should be enacted that terminates
the storage of bulk telephony meta-data by the government under
section 215, and transitions as soon as reasonably possible to a system in
which such meta-data is held instead either by private providers or by a
private third party. Access to such data should be permitted only with a
section 215 order from the Foreign Intellience Surveillance Court that
meets the requirements set forth in Recommendation 1.
Recommendation 20
We recommend that the US Government should examine the
feasibility of creating software that would allow the National Security
Agency and other intelligence agencies more easily to conduct targeted
information acquisition rather than bulk-data collection.
Recommendation 20 is basically recommending ThinThread, which would conceivably end the necessity of bulk collection. Up to the administration to take things that route, of course.
