NSA Review Panel Challenges Value of Bulk Metadata Collection

Testifying before a Senate committee

The members of president Barack Obama's surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program's potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.

Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.

Richard Clarke, who was the White House's counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.

"If the information that the federal agencies had at the time had been shared among the agencies, then one of them, the FBI, could have gone to the Fisa Court and could have in a very timely manner gotten a warrant to monitor" US-based al-Qaida conspirators, Clarke told the Senate judiciary committee.