US: Obama orders curbs on usage of NSA data

National Security Agency (NSA)

US president Barack Obama has ordered curbs on the use of the bulk data collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies, saying that greater care should be taken to protect civil liberties at a speech at the Department of Justice.

Obama said that the large-scale “dragnet” programmes and huge volumes of data collected by the NSA had been successful in protecting the US form terrorist attacks, but in their rush to implement such initiatives the government may have over-reached itself.

Obama also promised that the US would no longer monitor the communications of heads of states of allied countries, such as the recent revelations that the US was monitoring the private phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The announcement comes after months of leaks from former NSA analyst Edward Snowden, mostly published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, which showed the extent that the NSA monitored the communications of law-abiding citizens in the US and abroad.

Obama said that he recognised that the volume of data collected allowed for the “potential of abuse”, but claimed that the intelligence agencies had not sought to break the law or infringe on people’s rights, and he would not apologise for the success and effectiveness of these intelligence gathering programmes.

The President outlined future plans for limiting NSA data collecting, saying that NSA would need “legal permission” to access details of phone calls which would be held by an independent third party. He went on to say that a panel of independent advocates would also sit on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oversee mass surveillance programmes in the future to give the pubic greater confidence that their rights were being protected in the future.