Obama’s Speech: A Little Relief, More Dereliction of Duty

John Yoo:

Conservatives could react to President Barack Obama’s NSA speech today with a collective “whew,” sop their brows, and say it could have been a lot worse. President Obama did not give in to the pleas of the antiwar Left and cripple the NSA completely, or end the collection and analysis of telephone metadata. He should receive some credit for a speech that recognized the long American history of signals intelligence — the interception of foreign communications — and its great benefits during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWII, and the Cold War. Critics who want the NSA’s activities shut down should read about the Battle of Midway, where U.S. cryptographers intercepted the Japanese fleet movements, or the 9/11 Commission report, which details how American inability to track terrorist communications inside the U.S. allowed the hijackers to go undetected.

But that said, President Obama’s speech is an unfortunate example of a president’s seeking to avoid the responsibilities of the office that he wanted so badly. He seeks to place the NSA under unprecedented restrictions, producing little gains in privacy at the cost of a reduction in our security. His most sweeping change is his order to the intelligence community to begin preparing for a “transition” to a new system where the the government will not collect and store phone-call records. It is the comprehensive collection of all calling records into one database and the ability to search them quickly that allows the government to uncover links between a safehouse in Yemen, for example, and potential terrorists abroad. Break up the database into pieces and the government cannot track down the chain quickly, giving terrorist cells the ability to cover up their tracks by changing phone numbers, tossing out cell phones, and staying on the move.

But that is exactly what President Obama wants to do. He doesn’t want to have the responsibility to collect and keep all of this information — a responsibility he shoulders because he is the head of the executive branch and commander-in-chief, vested with the responsibility to protect the nation from foreign attack. But because of worries about privacy and the rights of foreigners outside the United States, he is considering either having the private telephone companies keep these records or — in a truly fanciful idea — creating some vague third party to hold the database of calls. This will only slow down our intelligence and law enforcement as they seek to find terrorists inside the U.S. who do their best to blend into normal civilian life, and lead to an incomplete and imprecise picture of their activities.

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