NSA: Surveillance court says no upper limit on phone records collection

A U.S. surveillance court has given the National Security Agency no limit on the number of U.S. telephone records it collects in the name of fighting terrorism, the NSA director said Thursday.

The NSA intends to collect all U.S. telephone records and put them in a searchable “lock box” in the interest of national security, General Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, told U.S. senators.

“There is no upper limit” on NSA telephone-records collection, Alexander said. “I believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put all the phone records into a lock box that we can search when the nation needs to do it.”

The NSA would need to notify the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress before collecting some other types of U.S. communications, including mobile-phone location information, Alexander told senators. The NSA doesn't currently have plans to collect mobile-phone location information, he said.

Alexander, other intelligence officials and several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence defended the NSA’s data collection and surveillance efforts during a committee hearing.

The NSA collection of U.S. phone records, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden earlier this year, are “lawful, effective and constitutional,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the committee.

Nevertheless, Feinstein said she's working on a bill that would add transparency to the data collection process at the NSA and the surveillance court. Some of the provisions she described would reinforce current NSA practices, but the bill would also give the NSA new authority to continue to conduct surveillance on foreign suspects who enter the U.S. while the agency seeks court-ordered warrants.

Feinstein, chairwoman of the committee that's supposed to oversee the NSA surveillance programs, at one point interrupted witness Tim Edgar, a former director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House, when he talked about the NSA's unauthorized collection of some U.S. communications. Feinstein defended the NSA, saying the agency immediately reported the mistake to the surveillance court.

"I really believe the NSA is extraordinarily careful in what they do," she said. "I have great faith in the NSA."

Alexander, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and some committee members blamed what they called inaccurate media reports on the Snowden leaks for creating an environment of mistrust in the NSA by the general public.

Some media organizations are feeding “raw meat to people who refuse to look at the facts” that the NSA’s data collections are legal and protect privacy, said Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican.

“It’s very frustrating to know that we have programs that comply with the law, that have been approved by the Congress, that have been approved by the president of the United States, that are saving Americans’ lives, and there are efforts to compromise those programs to convince a nontrusting public,” Coats said. “Had we not had these programs in place, I’d hate to think of what we’d be talking about” at the hearing.

Clapper agreed with Coats. Intelligence officials are frustrated in their efforts to “counter the popular narrative” about the surveillance programs, he said.

But Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and critic of the NSA programs, pointed his finger back at U.S. intelligence officials. Abuses alleged in the NSA programs were bound to be made public, said Wyden, who introduced legislation Wednesday that would prohibit bulk collection of phone records by the NSA.

“I believe that any government official who thought that the intrusive, constitutionally flawed surveillance system would never be disclosed was ignoring history,” Wyden said. “The leadership of your agencies built an intelligence collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people. Time and time again, the American people were told one thing about domestic surveillance in public forums, while government agencies did something else in private.”

Updated at 3:25 p.m. PT with additional information about mobile-phone location data collection.

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service.
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EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants

Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy facility near DeKalb, Miss., seen under construction on Nov. 13, 2012. Carbon dioxide will be captured from this plant and used to stimulate production of oil from existing wells.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The Environmental Protection Agency's second stab at a proposal to set the first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants would make it impossible for companies to build the kind of coal-fired plants that have been the country's biggest source of electricity for decades.

Under the proposal, released Friday, any new plant that runs on coal would only be permitted to emit about half as much carbon dioxide as an average coal plant puts into the air today.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy tells NPR the steps the EPA is proposing in the rule to address climate change "can actually form the basis for a sound economy, while at the same time we can begin to tackle what is essentially the most significant public health challenge of our time."

The gasifier facility, still under construction at Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy plant on Nov. 13, 2012. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP The gasifier facility, still under construction at Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy plant on Nov. 13, 2012. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The EPA proposal aims to help The White House meet its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by attacking the largest single source in the United States: Power plants pump out 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.

The EPA's new proposal sets a limit for future power plants of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour for large electricity generators that are powered by natural gas. And it sets a slightly higher limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour for small natural gas generators and for coal-fired generators.

Although the EPA says its rule is legally sound, electric utility companies are already arguing that it goes further than the law allows.

The only technologies that exist to make coal plants clean enough to meet this proposed standard, industry executives say, are far too expensive and haven't been proven at a commercial scale. Making coal plants clean enough, they say, would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the already steep price tag of coal plants.

"Our customers have to agree to foot that bill," says Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities.

Akins says his customers won't go for it.

A few years ago, American Electric Power built a temporary, small-scale project that successfully captured carbon and stored it deep underground at its massive Mountaineer coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The company proposed building a larger version at the same site and passing the costs on to consumers. But state regulators rejected that project in the end because it would increase electricity costs.

If the EPA's proposal goes forward, Akins says, companies won't build coal plants; natural gas plants are cheaper. But that strategy would make companies and their customers vulnerable to future spikes in natural gas prices, he says.

The revised proposal comes after loud complaints from industry about the first version of the proposed rule, which was released 18 months ago. That initial version proposed one standard for all power plants, regardless of their size, or the type of fuel they use.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity industry already have declined because economic considerations have led utility companies to start turning away from coal. These days, utilities are building natural gas plants and wind farms instead. New technologies for drilling into deep shale deposits have opened up abundant supplies of relatively low-cost natural gas. And subsidies and technological improvements have made wind farms competitive.

Electricity companies fought hard against the EPA's first proposal largely because they see it as as a bad precedent for upcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that already exist.

President Obama has told the EPA to come up with a proposal by June of 2014 to clean up the older plants. (Even though companies are already developing fewer new coal-fired plants, they're likely to rely on many of the existing coal plants for decades to come).

Environmental groups, too, are closely reading Friday's proposal, hunting for clues to how stringent the administration is likely to be when it turns in 2014 to developing new rules for existing plants.

"The sooner we get these protections in place," says Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, "the clearer the signal [will be] that new power plants must do their fair share in addressing the heavy burden of carbon pollution on human health and the environment."

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