President Obama’s privacy chief wants NSA phone-snooping program to end now

David Medine had not been on the job for a week as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when The Guardian dropped its first of many bombs supplied by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

As Medine described it, the revelation that the NSA was bulk-collecting the metadata from every phone call made to and from the United States "was sort of a fast-moving train that we decided to jump on."

"My first week we requested a briefing from the Justice Department. The third week we met in the Situation Room with the president," Medine said. Six months later, the five-member executive branch board released a scathing report, arguing in January that the NSA must cease the bulk collection of the phone numbers of all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the calling card numbers used in calls, and the time and duration of those calls to and from the United States.

By a 3-2 vote, the presidential panel concluded that, among other things, the program "implicates constitutional concerns.”