How Obama Unilaterally Chilled Surveillance

[Commentary] How dangerous: Just as the U.S. faces the most diverse threats in its history, the American intelligence community is forced to operate under some of the most restrictive and bureaucratically ambiguous intelligence-gathering policies since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Nothing reflects these self-imposed restrictions better than Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28). Among its many flaws, PPD-28 requires that, when collecting intelligence on foreign threats, U.S. operatives “must take into account (that) all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they may reside and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests.” This feel-good provision puts a serious crimp in foreign signals-intelligence collection.

In a crisis-riddled world, the country can’t afford to have the White House micromanaging intelligence collection. Let U.S. intelligence professionals do their job under the traditional oversight provided by the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. With PPD-28 in place, they can’t do that.

[Shedd was deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from September 2010 to August 2014 and acting director until January 2015]