Inside the White House N.S.A. Report: The Good and the Bad

On several occasions this year, I’ve criticized the Obama Administration for its obfuscations on intelligence matters and its overly defensive reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations. At this stage, the President needs to fess up and say that the intelligence agencies went too far—a fact confirmed by Friday’s revelation, courtesy of Snowden’s documents, that the N.S.A. and C.G.H.Q., its British counterpart, have been snooping on international charities and aid groups, such as UNICEF, the United Nations’s children’s charity, and Médecins du Monde, a French humanitarian organization.

But a bit of credit where it is due. In commissioning an independent report on the National Security Agency’s activities, the White House didn’t follow the oft-used tactic of stuffing the outside review panel with yes men who could be relied upon to produce a whitewash—or, if it did, the ruse didn’t work. The report of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which came out on Wednesday, is lengthy and thoughtful. Its forty-six recommendations are, in some ways, surprisingly far-reaching. If fully enacted, they wouldn’t put an end to domestic surveillance. Far from it. But they would change how the N.S.A. operates, and, especially, how its activities are overseen.

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