A review group hand-picked by United States President Barack Obama said last week that the National Security Agency needs to reform dozens of the ways it does business. One member of that panel, however, says the NSA doesn’t do enough.
Michael Morell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of the five-person NSA review group compiled by Pres. Obama, said in a recent interview that the secretive US spy agency should have its powers expanded to collect not just telephone metadata, but email information as well.
“I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data,” Morell told National Journal. “You can bet that the last thing a smart terrorist is going to do right now is call someone in the United States.”
Speaking only days after the panel sent the White House a list of 46 recommendations they’ve suggested to reign in the NSA, Morell told the magazine that one of the agency’s biggest tools – Section 215 of the Patriot Act – could likely “stop the next 9/11” if it is authorized to collect emails.
“I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future,” he said. “This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11, and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened.”
In a separate interview over the weekend with CBS News reporter Bob Schieffer, Morell insisted “the NSA is not spying on Americans” and that the agency didn’t act out of turn as its critics have suggested.
The NSA “is not focused on any single American,” Morell said. “It is not reading the content of your phone calls or my phone calls or anybody else’s phone calls. It is focused on this metadata for one purpose only, and that is to make sure that foreign terrorists aren’t in contact with anybody in the United States.”
And according to Morell, it’s no coincidence that there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack waged at the US since the NSA was awarded new abilities authorize by Congress with the passage of the post-9/11 Patriot Act.