Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden have penned an important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, explaining why an ill-conceived NSA reform bill — being hyped as the USA Freedom Act — would be a coup for terrorists. As the authors relate, the bill would replace the NSA’s much slandered bulk collection of telephone “metadata” with a cumbersome process that will lose precious terror connections and cost precious time while turning intelligence collection into an adversarial judicial process. Judge Mukasey and General Hayden observe:
Proponents say this change is necessary to allay fears that the NSA could use telephone metadata to construct an electronic portrait of an American citizen’s communications, and determine whether that person has, say, consulted a psychiatrist, or called someone else’s spouse. However, only 22 people at the NSA are permitted access to metadata, and only upon a showing of relevance to a national-security investigation, and they are barred from any data-mining whatsoever even in connection with such an investigation. They are overseen by a Madisonian trifecta of the FISA court, the executive and committees of Congress. Those people and everyone else at the NSA live in constant dread of failing to detect a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, the sponsors of the USA Freedom Act prefer the counsel of hypothetical fears to the logic of concrete realities.
The full op-ed is here.