It is precarious to comment on a leaked version of broad conclusions from a government report. But I think the NYT [
Obama Panel Said to Urge N.S.A. Curbs; open source] and WSJ [
Presidential Task Force Recommends Overhaul of NSA Surveillance Tactics - Draft Proposals Would Change Spy Agency's Leadership to Civilian, Limit How It Gathers and Holds Information; paywall] accounts of the recommendations by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology – which consists of Richard A. Clarke, Michael Morell, Cass Sunstein, Geoffrey Stone, and Peter Swire – on the whole reveal solid recommendations that, if implemented, will benefit both NSA and U.S. national security.
...
•The panel recommends that the head of NSA be a civilian rather than military official. This change was coming in any event in light of the NSA’s deeper-than-ever involvement in homeland collection, and is appropriate.
•More controversial, but also inevitable, is the recommendation to chop off Cyber Command from NSA – this recommendation is debatable in light of the tight connection between cyber-exploitation and cyber-attack, but it has powerful arguments behind it and again was probably going to happen anyway.
•Apparently the panel recommends continuation of domestic telephone meta-data collection, but with the data being collected/held by the phone companies or a third-party, not NSA, and subject to stricter search criteria. This is probably close to the Sensenbrenner/Leahy bill that the NSA opposes, and indeed it would likely make metadata analysis more difficult, cumbersome, and expensive. This is a large change from the current baseline, but it is does not appear to come close to eliminating the functional benefits of metadata collection and analysis. Indeed, one can see the bottom line, as the NYT put it, that the “program to collect data on every phone call made in the United States should continue.”
•The panel apparently recommends an organization of privacy advocates to enhance adversariness before the FISC. This is another previously-broached recommendation that will slow things down and weaken the government’s legal hand before the FISC, but that overall will enhance the legitimacy of FISC rulings and thus of NSA activities.
•The committee apparently proposes guidelines for foreign collection against foreign citizens, including foreign leaders. The devil will be in the details here, but while there will certainly be some restraint imposed, I doubt seriously if it will involve a significant scale-back of foreign collection. But it is hard to tell based on the news reports. ...