THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 17, 2014
FACT SHEET: Review of U.S. Signals Intelligence
In the latter half of 2013 and early 2014, the United States
Government undertook a broad-ranging and unprecedented review of our
signals intelligence programs, led by the White House with relevant
Departments and Agencies across the Government. In addition to our own
intensive work, the review process drew on input from key stakeholders,
including Congress, the tech community, civil society, foreign partners,
the Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies, the
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and others. The
Administration’s review examined how, in light of new and changing
technologies, we can use our intelligence capabilities in a way that
optimally protects our national security while supporting our foreign
policy, respecting privacy and civil liberties, maintaining the public
trust, and reducing the risk of unauthorized disclosures. On January 17,
2014, the President delivered a speech at the Department of Justice to
announce the outcomes of this review process.
In that speech, the President made clear that the men and women of
the U.S. intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow
those protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people and
are not abusing authorities. When mistakes have been made, they have
corrected those mistakes. But for our intelligence community to be
effective over the long haul, we must maintain the trust of the American
people, and people around the world. To that end, the Administration
has developed a path forward that we believe should give the American
people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, while
preserving important tools that keep us safe, and that addresses
significant questions that have been raised overseas. Today the
President announced the Administration’s adoption of a series of
concrete and substantial reforms that the Administration will adopt
administratively or seek to codify with Congress, to include a majority
of the recommendations made by the Review Group.
New Presidential Policy Directive
Today, President Obama issued a new presidential policy directive for
our signals intelligence activities, at home and abroad. This directive
lays out new principles that govern how we conduct signals intelligence
collection, and strengthen how we provide executive branch oversight of
our signals intelligence activities. It will ensure that we take into
account our security requirements, but also our alliances; our trade and
investment relationships, including the concerns of our companies; and
our commitment to privacy and basic liberties. And we will review
decisions about intelligence priorities and sensitive targets on an
annual basis, so that our actions are regularly scrutinized by the
President’s senior national security team.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)
Since the review began, we’ve declassified over 40 opinions and orders
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which provides judicial
review of some of our most sensitive intelligence activities – including
the Section 702 program targeting foreign individuals overseas and the
Section 215 telephone metadata program. Going forward, the President
directed the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the
Attorney General, to annually review – for the purpose of
declassification – any future opinions of the Court with broad privacy
implications, and to report to the President and Congress on these
efforts. To ensure that the Court hears a broader range of privacy
perspectives, the President called on Congress to authorize the
establishment of a panel of advocates from outside the government to
provide an independent voice in significant cases before the Court.
Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Section 702 is a valuable program that allows the government to
intercept the communications of foreign targets overseas who have
information that’s important to our national security. The President
believes that we can do more to ensure that the civil liberties of U.S.
persons are not compromised in this program. To address incidental
collection of communications between Americans and foreign citizens, the
President has asked the Attorney General and DNI to initiate reforms
that place additional restrictions on the government’s ability to
retain, search, and use in criminal cases, communications between
Americans and foreign citizens incidentally collected under Section 702.
Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act
Under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act the government collects meta-data
related to telephone calls in bulk. We believe this is a capability
that we must preserve, and would note that the Review Group turned up no
indication that the program had been intentionally abused. But, we
believe we must do more to give people confidence. For this reason, the
President ordered a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk
metadata program as it currently exists, and establish a program that
preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding the
data.
This transition has two steps. Effective immediately, we will only
pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated
with a terrorist organization instead of three. The President has
directed the Attorney General to work with the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court so that during this transition period, the database
can be queried only after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency. On
the broader question, the President has instructed the intelligence
community and the Attorney General to use this transition period to
develop options for a new program that can match the capabilities and
fill the gaps that the Section 215 program was designed to address
without the government holding this meta-data, and report back to him
with options for alternative approaches before the program comes up for
reauthorization on March 28. At the same time, the President will
consult with the relevant committees in Congress to seek their views,
and then seek congressional authorization for the new program as needed.
National Security Letters
In investigating threats, the FBI relies on the use of National Security
Letters (NSLs), which can be used to require companies to provide
certain types of information to the government without disclosing the
orders to the subject of the investigation. In order to be more
transparent in how the government uses this authority, the President
directed the Attorney General to amend how we use NSLs to ensure that
non-disclosure is not indefinite, and will terminate within a fixed time
unless the government demonstrates a need for further secrecy.
We will also enable communications providers to make public more
information than ever before about the orders they have received to
provide data to the government. These companies have made clear that
they want to be more transparent about the FISA, NSL and law enforcement
requests that they receive from the government. The Administration
agrees that these concerns are important, and is in discussions with the
providers about ways in which additional information could be made
public.
Increasing Confidence Overseas
U.S. global leadership demands that we balance our security requirements
against our need to maintain trust and cooperation among people and
leaders around the world. For that reason, the new presidential
guidance lays out principles that govern what we do abroad, and
clarifies what we don’t do. The United States only uses signals
intelligence for legitimate national security purposes, and not for the
purpose of indiscriminately reviewing the e-mails or phone calls of
ordinary people.
What we don’t do: The United States does not collect intelligence to
suppress criticism or dissent. We do not collect intelligence to
disadvantage people based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual
orientation, or religion. And we do not collect intelligence to provide a
competitive advantage to U.S. companies, or U.S. commercial sectors.
What we will do: In terms of our bulk collection, we will only use
data to meet specific security requirements: counter-intelligence;
counter-terrorism; counter-proliferation; cyber-security; force
protection for our troops and allies; and combating transnational crime,
including sanctions evasion.
The President has also decided that we will take the unprecedented
step of extending certain protections that we have for the American
people to people overseas. He has directed the Attorney General and DNI
to develop these safeguards, which will limit the duration that we can
hold personal information, while also restricting the dissemination of
this information.
People around the world – regardless of their nationality – should
know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t
threaten our national security and takes their privacy concerns into
account.
This applies to foreign leaders as well. Given the understandable
attention that this issue has received, the President has made clear to
the intelligence community that – unless there is a compelling national
security purpose – we will not monitor the communications of heads of
state and government of our close friends and allies. And he has
instructed his national security team, as well as the intelligence
community, to work with foreign counterparts to deepen our coordination
and cooperation in ways that rebuild trust going forward.
While our intelligence agencies will continue to gather information
about the intentions of governments – as opposed to ordinary citizens –
around the world, in the same way that the intelligence services of
every other nation do, we will not apologize because our services may be
more effective. But heads of state and government with whom we work
closely, on whose cooperation we depend, should feel confident that we
are treating them as real partners. The changes the President ordered do
just that.
International Engagement
To support our work, the President has directed changes to how our
government is organized. The State Department will designate a senior
officer to coordinate our diplomacy on issues related to technology and
signals intelligence. The Administration will appoint a senior official
at the White House to implement the new privacy safeguards that we have
announced today. And the President has also asked his Counselor, John
Podesta, to lead a review of big data and privacy. This group will
consist of government officials who—along with the President’s Council
of Advisors on Science and Technology—will reach out to privacy experts,
technologists and business leaders, and look at how the challenges
inherent in big data are being confronted by both the public and
private sectors; whether we can forge international norms on how to
manage this data; and how we can continue to promote the free flow of
information in ways that are consistent with both privacy and security.
The President also announced that we will devote resources to
centralize and improve the process we use to handle foreign requests for
legal assistance, called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT)
process. Under MLAT, foreign partners can request access to information
stored in the United States pursuant to U.S. law. As the concentration
of U.S.-based cloud storage providers has increased, so has the number
of MLAT requests. To address this increase, we will speed up and
centralize MLAT processing; we will implement new technology to increase
the efficiency and transparency of the process; and we will increase
our international outreach and training to help ensure that requests
meet U.S. legal standards. We will put the necessary resources in
place to reduce our response time by half by the end of 2015, and we
will work aggressively to respond to legally sufficient requests in a
matter of weeks. This change will ensure that our foreign partners can
more effectively use information held in the U.S. to prosecute
terrorists and other criminals, while still meeting the strict privacy
protections put in place by U.S. law.
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In addition to the initiatives that were announced by the President,
the Administration’s review affirmed our commitment to ongoing
initiatives:
Consumer Privacy Codes of Conduct
Two years ago, the President released a Blueprint for Consumer Privacy
in the Digital Age as a “dynamic model of how to offer strong privacy
protection and enable ongoing innovation in new information
technologies.” Following the release of the Blueprint, the
Administration has convened the private sector, privacy experts, and
consumer advocates to develop voluntary codes of conduct to safeguard
sensitive consumer data. Last summer a multi-stakeholder group
completed the first such code on how mobile apps should access private
information. The Department of Commerce is continuing this
multi-stakeholder process, aiming to launch the development of new codes
of conduct in 2014.
Commitment to an Open Internet
Maintaining an open, accessible Internet, including the ability to
transmit data across borders freely is essential for global growth and
development. We will redouble our commitment to promote the free-flow
of information around the world through an inclusive approach to
Internet governance and policymaking. Individuals in the 21st century
depend on free and unfettered access to data flows without arbitrary
government regulation. Businesses depend increasingly on agreed
data-sharing regimes that allow information to move seamlessly across
borders in support of global business operations. Developing countries
and small businesses around the world in particular have a lot at stake,
and much to lose from limitations restricting the Internet as an engine
of prosperity and expression. Requirements to store data or locate
hardware in a given location hurt competition, stifle innovation, and
diminish economic growth. And they undermine the DNA of the Internet,
which by design is a globally-distributed network of networks. We will
continue to support the multi-stakeholder, inclusive approach to the
Internet and work to strengthen and make more inclusive its
policy-making, standards-setting, and governance organizations.
