WASHINGTON — A White House-appointed board published a comparative chart Thursday on how U.S. intelligence agencies use a Reagan-era executive order to collect Americans’ private information, adding fuel to an already smoldering debate.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an executive branch watchdog established to weigh Americans’ civil liberties against the government’s need to gather intelligence, compiled the chart on Executive Order 12333, which governs a large chunk of the government’s intelligence collection.
The agency guidelines noted in the table weren’t necessarily unknown to the public before — in most cases, they were buried in government websites. But what the oversight board’s effort shows is how outdated many of those guidelines are. Most agencies have not revisited their handling of data collection since the early 2000s, and in some cases not since the 1980s.
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That bill was ultimately never enacted, like every other piece of NSA reform legislation that was proposed. But, as one Intelligence Committee staffer put it, “The issue remains.”
It’s unclear whether lawmakers will take a whack at 12333 this year, especially as reformers are struggling just to get in a few jabs at the NSA programs before a June deadline for their reauthorization.
