Congress-approved board says NSA program “lacks a viable legal foundation."

According to leaked copies of a forthcoming report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the government’s metadata collection program "lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value… As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program."

The metadata program, which compels at least Verizon (and likely other telcos as well) to routinely hand over all phone records to the National Security Agency, was first disclosed as the result of the leak by Edward Snowden in June 2013.

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"The Board believes that the Section 215 program has contributed only minimal value in combating terrorism beyond what the government already achieves through these and other alternative means," the report said, according to the Post. "Cessation of the program would eliminate the privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with bulk collection without unduly hampering the government’s efforts, while ensuring that any governmental requests for telephone calling records are tailored to the needs of specific investigations."

According to the Times, the report also agrees with outside analysis, concluding that there is "no instance in which the [metadata] program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack."

The Post also quoted from a section of the report that specifically rejected an argument, frequently made by President Barack Obama and members of his administration, that the metadata program would have been useful had it been available prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, as it may have ensnared Khalid al-Mihdhar, a known terrorism suspect. Mihdhar was calling a Yemen-based safehouse, but what the NSA did not realize at the time was that he was doing so from San Diego, California.


"The failure to identify Mihdhar’s presence in the United States stemmed primarily from a lack of information sharing among federal agencies, not of a lack of surveillance capabilities," the report said, according to the Post.