WASHINGTON - The Obama administration will continue the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and Cyber Command operations under the direction of a single military commander, officials said Friday, the same day a review board sent the White House more than 40 recommendations on intelligence collection and government spying.
The White House did not make the task force’s report public. Published reports Friday described the recommendations as limited in scope.
After revelations this summer about sweeping phone and Internet data collection in the U.S. and around the world, critics have urged the White House to split up the responsibilities of the NSA’s director by separating the agency’s surveillance and Cyber Command operations.
Recent media revelations stemming from leaks from former agency contractor Edward Snowden showed the blurring effect of the agency’s dual roles abroad. Reports revealed the NSA spied on foreign governments and companies alike, using its unique computer hacking abilities to tap into financial and corporate files and the private communications of allies as well as the calling and web patterns of suspected terrorists.
But National Security Council spokesman Caitlin Hayden said Friday that the government believes that maintaining the oversight responsibilities together under one command is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies’ missions.
The White House said the review group working under the director of national intelligence delivered its findings on NSA surveillance to President Barack Obama.
The director’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology held no public meetings and met several times with business and privacy groups out of the range of the media and public. Director office head James Clapper exempted the panel from standard federal requirements that it work transparently.
The White House is reviewing the task force recommendations and finalizing its own internal study, Hayden said. She said the process was expected to be finished in January, after which Obama would speak publicly on any changes to the government’s intelligence gathering and surveillance. The review board report is also expected to be made public after that point.
The panel’s recommendations come as skepticism over NSA surveillance mounts in Congress and from technology companies and privacy groups worried that reports of foreign data intercepts could drive away international customers.
Although the task force has kept its recommendations secret, news organizations cited government officials in sketching out proposals that would allow most of the surveillance programs to continue but change ownership of the government’s large inventory of telephone records and restrict spying on allied nations.
Also Friday, more leaked NSA documents revealed that the cellphone encryption technology used most widely across the world can be easily defeated by the NSA, giving it the means to decode most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over public airwaves every day.
Encryption experts have said for years that the most commonly used technology, known as A5/1, is vulnerable and have urged providers to upgrade to newer systems that are much harder to crack. Most companies worldwide have not done so.
The extent of the NSA’s collection of cellphone signals and its use of tools to decode encryption are not clear from the top-secret document provided by Snowden, but it says the agency “can process encrypted A5/1” even when the agency has not acquired an encryption key, which unscrambles communications so they are readable.
The vulnerability outlined in the NSA document concerns encryption developed in the 1980s but still used widely by cellphones that rely on second-generation, or 2G, technology. It is dominant in most of the world but less so in the wealthiest nations, including the United States, where newer networks such as 3G and 4G provide faster speeds and better encryption, industry officials said.
But even where such updated networks are available, they are not always used, because many phones often still rely on 2G networks to make or receive calls. When a phone indicates a 3G or 4G network, a voice call might actually be carried over an older frequency and susceptible to decoding, experts said.
The NSA has repeatedly stressed that its data collection efforts are aimed at overseas targets, whose legal protections are much lower than those of U.S. citizens.
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace and Stephen Braun of The Associated Press and by Craig Timberg and Ashkan Soltani of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 12/14/2013