The controversial National Security Agency surveillance program which gathers and stores millions of American's conversations in the sake of fighting terrorism has been ruled illegal by a government panel who also ruled it should be shut down on Thursday, the Associated Press reported.
"The bulk telephone records program lacks a viable legal foundation ... implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter and has shown only limited value,'' a majority of the five-member board announced, according to the AP.
The 234-page report released on Thursday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board also said the collection of "so-called meta-data is illegal," the AP reported.
The report also acknowledges two of the board members disagreement with the ruling. Both are former Bush administration national security lawyers and both recommended the government keep its "authority" over the telephone surveillance program, according to the AP.
The oversight board reported details of the key parts of the findings to President Barack Obama earlier this month, before he made his speech last week, the AP reported. The Obama administration disagrees with the ruling and insists the surveillance program is needed.
Rachel Brand, one of the board members, did not recommend to end the program "without an adequate alternative already in place," according to USA Today. She also called the bulk amount of information "quite small."
The board's overall majority also warned against NSA's daily intake of calling records and said it "raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties," the AP reported.
The board also added that besides shutting down the program the government should also "purge the database of telephone records that have been collected and stored during the program's operation," a key detail President Obama did not mention in his speech earlier this week, according to the AP.
As an alternative to obtaining necessary phone records, the board said the NSA should use "existing legal authorities" and phone service providers instead, the AP reported.
National Security Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement from the White House on Thursday that "The administration believes the program is lawful," adding that Obama "believes we can and should make changes in the program that will give the American people greater confidence in it."
The three member majority in favor of dismantling the program and its saved data held firm on their ruling, despite the president's disapproval, the AP reported.
"When the government collects all of a person's telephone records, storing them for five years in a government database that is subjected to high-speed digital searching and analysis, the privacy implications go far beyond what can be revealed by the metadata of a single telephone call," the majority wrote.
