The privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board of the public for men to discuss the freedom act which is a modified extension of the patriot act. Privacy and data experts examine section 215 which allows the nsc to collect phone records. A morning and thank you to everyone for coming. This is the Second Public event since reba gained our quorum late last year. Much of our agencys work takes place outside the public eye because of classified information. We hope these events will upon the public about her work and the programs we oversee. We hope to learn from the panel a very distinguished expert panelists we have invited here today. Todays event will look at surveillance powers scheduled to terminate at the end of the year. Call detail records provide information like the time a call and the numbers on either end. The last summer in sa announced it had begun to leading all call records since 2015 under this authority. As part of our continuing oversight of the call detail records we have been reviewing this Program Including challenges in sa has acknowledged. We look forward to providing information to congress at the end of the Years Congress conducts its analysis of the expiring authorities. We hope to provide as much information to the public with the protection of classified information. One final note and that pain before he handed over to my colleagues, we are able to discuss unclassified Public Information and we will not speculate or comment on any speculation that may have appeared in the press. Our agency protects classified information. If we didnt, we wouldnt be trusted. We take this obligation seriously. With that i turned to my colleagues. Thanks to our panelists and my fellow Board Members and to staff that of the made this event available. Id like to briefly outline structure and function. The board was created at the recommendation of the 9 11 commission. Congress passed an act which created the current version of the board. The board is an independent body. The boards bipartisan means no more than three of its five members coming from any political party. A quorum of the members is required to operate. The chairman is a fulltime employee and the other members are parttime. All members have security clearances so the work can be the executive branchs efforts to prevent terrorism are consistent with the need to protect privacy and Civil Liberties. Much of the boards work related technology. The use of emerging technologies creates both opportunities and challenges for privacy and Civil Liberties. The board has established a strategic goal of conducting rigorous analysis of new and emerging analysis and protecting the nation against terrorism and the preservation of privacy and Civil Liberties. The board has two main functions. Advice and oversight. Under the advice function, agencies can consult with the board on new policies, programs or procedures to ensure Civil Liberties are factored into the design of those programs. They are confidential and allow agencies to get an independent assessment before deciding how to proceed. The board does not speak publicly about projects unless the Relevant Agency and the board have agreed to publicly it knowledge the advice. Under the oversight function the board engages in analysis of actions they take to fight terrorism. They assess whether those security measures are consistent. The board holds briefings with agencies and refused documents and reports and recommendations. Some of the boards reports remain classified and some are published. We strive for transparency consistent with the need to protect classified information. In all cases the board strives to make recommendations that are pragmatic and increase the effectiveness of security, privacy, and Civil Liberties. The previous work was conducted under the boards authority. Our current work is a continuing exercise of the boards oversight. With that i will pass it to my fellow ward member. Thank you. Id like to think the panelists for coming and testifying before us today and are members of the public for attending as well. I will talk briefly about the boards past work. I will turn briefly to the usa freedom act. I know for some this will be old and no news. Just bear with me. The boards engagement with the Telephone Records Program began after the snowden leaks. They described a program that collected millions of telephone records including domestic calls. Disclosures caused a great deal of concern among policymakers and about one week after the initial articles were published, the board was approached and asked to investigate the program and provide a report so they can have a debate about the program and the privacy issues raised. About six months later they issued a report in january 2014. Contained extensive description of the program. Many had been to classified and offered the public greater insight into the program and the privacy impact. The government had been collecting records in bulk with the approval of the feds. Contained extensive policy and legal analysis and recommendations. Recommendations included those impacting the operations of the program and those that address the board recommended the court here additional independent voices when considering governmental applications. The usa freedom act became law in june 2015. It significantly report the Telephone Records Program. Require the government have a specific selection term to be used as the basis of obtaining any tangible thing and require a judge determined the selector term it a reasonable suspicion standard. Some provisions contained a sunset date of this upcoming december. There is a current form of 215. Todays event will focus on the Telephone Records Program. We will, panelists to testify about any provisions they think useful. We very much appreciate you taking the time and we look forward to your comments. I will now introduce briefly our first panel. Caroline lynch is the founder and owner of copper hill strategies. She previously spent 15 years on capitol hill including 10 of those years as a senior staff member where she worked on various pieces of landmark legislation most notably for todays purposes to usa freedom act. A dual appointment at the Universitys Department of computer science. She is the author of listening in cybersecurity in an insecure age and has received numerous honors and fellowships and authored many other publications on National Security. And finally with the sunscreen is the founder and executive director of the National Security institute at George Mason University where he is an assistant professor of law. He is Vice President for strategy and partnerships at iron it cybersecurity. He has Prior Experience as a senior staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence and the justice departments National Security division. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here today and i appreciate the invitation to speak with you about the call detail Record Authority created under the act. I want to begin by noting the usa freedom act is not a piece of legislation undertaken lightly. It is probably one of the better examples of legislative sausage making a living at two year process that was bipartisan and appalled input from a variety of outside sources and multiple federal agencies. And so despite these reports about how the authorities have been implemented, it truly was a concerted effort by congress to get it right. I thought i would begin by providing a little bit of background about section 501, whats commonly known as section 215. It originally had relatively narrow scope and standard that was expanded twice the patriot act reauthorization in 2001 and 2005. Ultimately providing a standard that i think is important to the conversation about the Metadata Program and how congress constructed the call detail Record Program. It is essentially a statement of facts that there are reasonable grounds to believe records are relevant to a foreign intelligence investigation. It was that standard that the government relied upon when it sought to transition the Metadata Program from the president Surveillance Program under section 501 or 215. And without authority approved the government was able to collect large volumes of metadata on the premise that once analyzed and queried they would find relevant records inside that. That program continued for several years with large volumes of metadata including information about americans being collected and then stored and analyzed when the government would have an identifier or a specific selection term related to a potential terror suspects. I think its important to note that while we are talking extensively about the call detail Record Program. , section 215 as the authority for the fbi to gather Third Party Business records in both counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations. What the director will call traditional 215 authority. That was a driving consideration on how congress craft did the call detail Record Program within section 215 and an effort to preserve the fbis quote unquote traditional use of that authority. I thought i was speak for a moment about how Congress Responded to the leaks of 2013 to contact for the board are members of the public here. Congress was in between authorizations if you will. In 2011 congress reauthorize the usa patriot act and congress had reauthorized the [ indiscernible ] fact and that is the source of section 702. Typically members of congress are briefed about the classified use of those authorities in conjunction with an impending subset. In addition, in between those three authorizations we had an election. We had new members of the house. At that time pfizer was really not at the top of the minds of congress. Working with pfizer presents a challenge compared to other statutes. While the act is public the use of the act is largely classified. While members are privy to classified information, routine oversight is typically conducted by the committees of jurisdiction and their staff. And so from their the process continued until we were able to achieve consensus right on the heels of the Expiration Date in june 2015, june 2. As you mentioned, the call detail Record Program attempts to provide a more targeted version if you will of metadata collection. So rather, rather than the records being collected in bulk and stored by the nsa to be queried later, the call detail Record Program modeled after reforms that were implemented by president obama in early 2014 requires the government to seek a court order based on a reasonable suspicion to then collect the records also records on an ongoing basis for up to 180 days. The challenge for the negotiators is again how can we create the cdr program prohibit all collection and preserve the fbis traditional authority. And so the approach that we decided to take was to maintain
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