Obama puts modest limits on surveillance by US intelligence

President Barack Obama has made limited changes to protect the privacy of Americans and foreigners with new rules on how US intelligence agents gather and retain data on phone and internet use.

Under new rules covering mass US surveillance operations, the White House is forcing intelligence agents to destroy private phone, email and internet data that may inadvertently be collected about Americans that have no intelligence value and to delete similar information about foreigners within a five-year period.

Previously, US intelligence officials were permitted to retain this information indefinitely.

The Obama administration will also introduce regular White House reviews of the monitoring of foreign leaders by the National Security Agency, the US government authority that oversees the programmes.

German surveillance

The rules, first reported by the

New York Times

, were announced ahead of a visit to the White House by German chancellor

Angela Merkel

next Monday. Ms Merkel last year protested over US surveillance in her country, including of her mobile phone.

The revelations about the US surveillance emerged from leaks by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has avoided prosecution in the US by obtaining temporary asylum in Russia.

Mr Snowden’s disclosures caused controversy about the scope of the US surveillance programmes, raising concerns precautions taken for national security reasons may infringe privacy.

The White House is changing how investigators use subpoenas, known as “national security letters”, that allow them to force companies to hand over information on customers without the order of a judge.

The FBI will lift gag orders on companies receiving the letters either after three years or at the end of an investigation, whichever is earliest.

Under the new rules, foreigners would be able to ask US courts to block the misuse of private information passed from an overseas government to US investigators or law-enforcement agencies, but they would not be able to stop use of conversations captured by the NSA.

Public trust

Aiming to restore public trust following the damaging Snowden revelations, Mr Obama promised a year ago he would end the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records and replace it with another means of allowing counter-terrorism investigators to access data.

The new rules, announced on Tuesday, make no changes to the mass collection of data about US telephone calls. This requires legislation to be passed – which Congress failed to do last year.

Obama administration officials are hopeful that legislation can be passed before the authority to collect bulk data expires on June 1st.