Obama
reform of spy agency access to phone metadata in question
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[February 04, 2015]
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack
Obama's pledge to reform the way U.S. spy agencies access vast amounts
of metadata on Americans' telephone calls is facing increasing
obstacles, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
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Obama promised to act after revelations by former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA had been
collecting and storing the data, including numbers called and the
time and length of calls but not their content.
The administration has said it no longer wants agencies such as the
NSA to hold the data and last year quietly abandoned one alternative
to have such data held by a non-governmental third party.
The remaining option is for telecommunications companies to gather
and store the data themselves.
But according to two U.S. officials, the companies have privately
told Congress they will not do so unless they are ordered to by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which needs new powers from
Congress to issue such orders.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Feb/04/images/ads/current/cca_laptop-sda021709.png) Last year, Congress failed to pass a bill to create such powers, and
a Congressional aide said that no such legislation was now pending.
The aide and an executive branch official said that prospects for
passing such legislation before a June deadline were uncertain.
Robert Litt, legal adviser to the Director of National Intelligence,
confirmed that the government's current legal authority to handle
telephone metadata expires on June 1.
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"I'm hoping we will be able to get legislation passed. Everybody
recognizes that there is utility to this," he said in a conference
call with reporters on Tuesday.
Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, however, said he saw "no
administration plan for going ahead" with telephone metadata
collection.
Asked what spy agencies would do if no new law was passed to
authorize collection of the metadata, Litt said: "I don't think
we're making those kinds of contingency plans at this point."
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by David Storey and Ken Wills)
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