“Had the program been in place more than a decade ago, it would likely have prevented 9/11. And it has the potential to prevent the next 9/11.”
So wrote Mike Morrell, the CIA’s former acting director, about section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the National Security Agency to search telephone “metadata” (i.e., connections between telephone numbers not the content of calls) to ferret out terrorists. Now section 215 is no more. After a delay of two days, in which the Senate let the PATRIOT Act lapse altogether, Senators finally swallowed their Castrol oil and approved a new and more restricted version of the telephone metadata program.
No longer will the NSA be able to keep records of phone calls in its own databases where they can be swiftly searched. Now the NSA will need to apply for a court order to search records which are kept by the phone companies — although how long the companies are supposed to keep the records or in what form remains unclear.
This is not the end of the world. It is, in fact, more or less the result advocated by Morrell and a panel of other experts appointed by President Obama to study the issue after the Edward Snowden revelations. (Although Morrell wrote that “personally” he would like to expand “the Section 215 program to include all telephone metadata (the program covers only a subset of the total calls made) as well as e-mail metadata (which is not in the program),” but he was not allowed to make that suggestion because it did not “fall under the same constraints recommended by the review group.”
But it is also a classic Washington solution in search of a problem.
What exactly was the problem with the current metadata program which has been part of the homeland security architecture keeping us largely safe since 9/11? Nothing beyond the unfounded hype generated by the likes of Ed Snowden and Rand Paul, who wrongly suggested that this allowed Big Brother to snoop on our phone calls. There is no evidence that this power was ever abused. There were only 150 such searches last by the NSA, and all of them were related to real national security concerns.
In fact, the NSA has been more responsible and restrained in its use of this technology than all of the big companies — from United Airlines, to Apple computers, to Hilton hotels, to Amazon—which routinely utilize far more intrusive programs to track the shopping preferences of their actual and potential customers. But apparently, for some reason, the Washington Randstanders are ok with commercial firms snooping on us to sell us stuff we don’t really need, but they’re not ok with the NSA snooping on us to protect us from terrorists.
So now we will have a drastic change in the program that may or may not impair its effectiveness. We don’t know yet what the impact of these changes will be, which is all the more reason we shouldn’t be making them when the threat from terrorism is as great as it is today. Ironically, on the very day when the Senate was passing a watered-down version of the PATRIOT Act, a terrorist suspect was fatally shot by police officers in Boston after resisting arrest.
But it was probably inevitable that some such change would be made by Congress after the Snowden revelations, and it’s just as well that the curtailment of the NSA was not more severe. The only way this could have been avoided altogether is if President Obama had made a full-throated defense of the NSA and laid it on the line for lawmakers, telling them that if they voted to rescind existing authorities they would be making it easier for terrorists to attack us. He didn’t do that.
As Senator John McCain noted, on this, as on most other national security issues, Obama has been largely AWOL. He clearly does not see himself in the role of a wartime commander-in-chief whose job is to rally the public to support our war efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at home. Rather, he clearly sees these threats as a distraction from “nation building at home,” which is what he is really interested in. And he sees his role as being a sagacious professor helping his “students” — that would be us — to reason toward an acceptable compromise. That’s a long way from the kind of steely leadership displayed by the likes of Lincoln, FDR, and Truman. Given that reality, this watered-down version of the PATRIOT Act is about the best we could hope for until we get a president who more fully embraces his (or her) commander-in-chief responsibilities.
