Why overhaul NSA surveillance if the White House panel found no evidence of malfeasance?

The Review Group’s report couldn’t point to an actual invasion of privacy from NSA’s collection of telephone metadata. Yet, astoundingly, the panel recommends that the program be terminated with a transition “as soon as reasonably possible to a system in which such meta-data is held instead either by private providers or by a private third party.”

In other words, if investigators want to check a telephone number they should be required to scurry around to each individual provider— AT&T, T +1.14% Verizon, etc.—to run the check, possibly against data bases that are inconsistently arranged, with consequent loss of time and efficiency. What if this arrangement “seriously undermines the effectiveness of the program,” as well as national security? The panel suggests that “the government might authorize a specially designated private organization to collect and store the bulk telephony metadata” (emphasis added).

The panel, in short, is recommending an experiment: If there is serious damage to the program—measured, say, by a successful terrorist attack—well, then we can have the data placed in the hands of a private party, and we know nothing can go wrong with that.