US looks at ways to prevent spying on NSA spying

The government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing who the US is spying on, even as the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession, The Associated Press has learned.
The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans' phone records with phone companies or a third-party organisation, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, US data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.
The administration has provided only vague descriptions about changes it is considering to the NSA's daily collection and storage of Americans' phone records, which are presently kept in NSA databanks. To resolve legal, privacy and civil liberties concerns, President Barack Obama this month ordered the attorney general and senior intelligence officials to recommend changes by March 28 that would allow the US to identify suspected terrorists' phone calls without the government holding the phone records itself.

One federal review panel urged Obama to order phone companies or an unspecified third party to store the records; another panel said collecting the phone records was illegal and ineffective and urged Obama to abandon the program entirely.
Internal documents describing the Security and Privacy Assurance Research project do not cite the NSA or its phone surveillance program. But if the project were to prove successful, its encrypted search technology could enable the NSA to conduct secure searches while shifting storage of phone records from agency data banks to either phone companies or a third-party organisation.
A DNI spokesman, Michael Birmingham, confirmed that the research was relevant to the NSA's phone records program. He cited "interest throughout the intelligence community" but cautioned that it may be some time before the technology is used.