A Charles Sturt University (CSU) expert says new Presidential guidelines to curtail US government surveillance are a good attempt to balance civil liberties, privacy, and national security.

Dr Patrick F. Walsh, senior lecturer in intelligence and security studies at the CSU Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, was commenting on the release on Friday 17 January of

President Obama's Presidential Policy Directive 28 (Signals Intelligence Activities) (PPD 28). The President's PPD 28 drew heavily on a report prepared by the President's Advisory Committee on the NSA, which was released on 12 December 2013 following multiple leaks by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

"The Snowden leaks compounded pressure on the Obama Administration, both from many US citizens and foreign political leaders, for Washington to do something about the perceived excesses of the NSA's surveillance programs," Dr Walsh said.

"President Obama's directive is his attempt to strike some balance - as difficult as this is to do – between the demands of foreign leaders, civil liberties and privacy advocates, and the needs of the US intelligence community to intercept the communications of terrorists and criminals who continue to plan and plot against the US or its allies, like Australia."

The key area that many in civil liberties groups were hoping to see in the President's PPD, according to Dr Walsh, was the abolition of metadata (details of times, telephone numbers, and duration of calls) stored by the NSA that includes data on US citizens and foreign nationals, which even the Presidential Advisory Committee had argued the US should stop collecting and storing (recommendation 4).

"I think President Obama was right to retain this bulk metadata component by the NSA, due to the pace and scale of global information traffic," Dr Walsh said.

"But his PPD seeks to place limits on how this bulk data can be used and orders the Director of National Intelligence to come back to him in one year with a report on the feasibility of creating software that would allow the intelligence community to more easily conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection. The rationales for not closing down the metadata capability will disappoint some in the civil liberties movement, and I am sceptical that much will come from this in one year, at least in public, given the technological focus remains on data mining and analytics of bulk data sources."

Dr Walsh said the PPD also focused on improving governance of intelligence agencies and improving cooperation between them, a subject he has researched previously.

"Intelligence governance is about making sure the government and leadership of each intelligence agency in the US and the Director, National Intelligence, work more effectively together to reform policies and processes relating to monitoring intelligence collection requirements, data quality, data security and access, and the dissemination of intelligence.

"Section 1 of the PPD outlines clearly the privacy and civil liberties principles that should govern all intelligence collection, not just that which is collected from signals communications. These have always been enshrined in various forms of intelligence-related legislation, but a clear, unadulterated articulation of them by the President is an important normative statement to make post-Snowden."

Dr Walsh observed that much is made in the PPD about the US intelligence community needing to be better at weighing the 'costs versus benefits' of using surveillance of phone records and computers.

"In determining what kind of information should be collected using signals intelligence, the President is asking the intelligence community to double-check if other sources can be used to access similar information, and whether intelligence collection priorities can be more routinely evaluated across the entire US intelligence community to ensure that alternatives to signals intelligence can be used, and their use is reviewed routinely."

Dr Walsh thinks that the final significant area addressed in PPD 28, and in the report prepared by the Advisory Committee, is the role of oversight.

"How do we get better oversight of the NSA to ensure its collection activities can be periodically audited to ensure that they uphold privacy and civil liberties of US citizens and non-citizens?" he asks. "Oversight of the US intelligence community is already like alphabet soup, so what else can be done?"But, all in all, PPD 28 is a small step in the right direction," Dr Walsh said. "I think it's important to remember though that the ultimate civil liberty is protection from harm, whether that be from criminals, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, or pandemics. We need this kind of surveillance capability to provide this security, but in liberal democracies it can never be a blank cheque."