The Office of the Director of National Intelligence

The Director of National Intelligence Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies was a review group formed by the Director of National Intelligence of the United States in light of the

global surveillance disclosures of 2013 Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret ...

. In December 2013, the five-member group produced a public report.

Formation

On August 12, 2013, President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

issued a Presidential Memorandum instructing the Director of National Intelligence,

James Clapper James Robert Clapper Jr. (born March 14, 1941) is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. H ...

, to form a "Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies". Obama instructed that "The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust." The memorandum called for an interim report within 60 days of establishment and a final report by December 15, 2013.

Membership

The group included former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, former Acting

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

director

Michael Morell Michael Joseph Morell (; born September 4, 1958) is an American former career intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013 and twice as its acting director, first in 2011 and then fr ...

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

Law professor

Geoffrey Stone Geoffrey R. Stone (born 1946) is an American law professor and noted First Amendment scholar. He is currently the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Biography Stone completed a B.S. deg ...

, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Cass Sunstein Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, law and behavioral economics. He is also ''The New York Times'' best-selling author of ...

and Professor and former Chief Counselor for Privacy in the

Office of Management and Budget The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP). OMB's most prominent function is to produce the president's budget, but it also examines agency programs, pol ...

Peter Swire Peter P. Swire (born May 15, 1958) is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair and Professor of Law and Ethics in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is an internationally recognized expert in privacy law. Swire ...

Report

The 300-page report, entitled "Liberty and Security in a Changing World", was released on December 12, 2013. It contained over 40 recommendations. Since the report's publications, a number of its 40 recommendations have been adopted into law with the

USA FREEDOM Act The USA Freedom Act (, ) is a U.S. law enacted on June 2, 2015, that restored and modified several provisions of the Patriot Act, which had expired the day before. The act imposes some new limits on the bulk collection of telecommunication metada ...

in particular addressing 7.

Reactions

The

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

released a statement criticizing the report, saying "we’re disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue untargeted spying. Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers." The

American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

(ACLU) released a statement welcoming the report, saying "We welcome this report, which advocates for many of the ACLU's positions, including an end to the government's dragnet collection of telephone metadata and its undermining of encryption standards."

References

External links

Official site of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies

Official report of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140125154220/http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/pdf/ReviewGroupReport.pdf , date=January 25, 2014

Global surveillance United States intelligence agencies Working groups