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But the rebooted campaign, known as Organizing for Action, has plunged the president and his aides into a campaign finance limbo with few clear rules, ample potential for influence-peddling, and no real precedent in national politics.

In private meetings and phone calls, Mr. Obama's aides have made clear that the new organization will rely heavily on a small number of deep-pocketed donors, not unlike the "super PACs" whose influence on political campaigns Mr. Obama once deplored.

At least half of the group's budget will come from a select group of donors who will each contribute or raise $500,000 or more, according to donors and strategists involved in the effort.

Unlike a presidential campaign, Organizing for Action has been set up as a tax-exempt "social welfare group." That means it is not bound by federal contribution limits, laws that bar White House officials from soliciting contributions, or the stringent reporting requirements for campaigns. In their place, the new group will self-regulate.

Officials said it would voluntarily disclose the names of large donors every few months and would not ask administration personnel to solicit money, though Obama aides will probably appear at some events.

The money will pay for salaries, rent and advertising, and will also be used to maintain the expensive voter database and technological infrastructure that knits together Mr. Obama's 2 million volunteers, 17 million e-mail subscribers and 22 million Twitter followers.

The goal is to harness those resources in support of Mr. Obama's second-term policy priorities, including efforts to curb gun violence and climate change and overhaul immigration procedures. Those efforts began Friday, when thousands of Obama supporters were deployed through more than 80 Congressional districts around the country to rally outside lawmakers' offices, hold vigils and bombard Congress with e-mails and phone calls urging members to support stricter background checks for gun buyers.

"There are wins we can have on guns and immigration," Jon Carson, the group's new executive director, told prospective donors on a conference call on Wednesday, according to people who participated. "We have to change the conventional wisdom on those issues."

But those contributions will also translate into access, according to donors courted by the president's aides. Next month, Organizing for Action will hold a "founders summit" at a hotel near the White House, where donors paying $50,000 each will mingle with Mr. Obama's former campaign manager, Jim Messina, and Mr. Carson, who previously led the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama's group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House. Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama's top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships.

"It just smells," said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, which advocates tighter regulation of campaign money. "The president is setting a very bad model setting up this organization."

Mr. Obama's new organization has drawn rebukes in recent days from watchdog groups, which view it as another step away from the tighter campaign regulation Mr. Obama once championed. Over the past two years, he has reversed course on several campaign finance issues, by blessing a super PAC created by former aides and accepting large corporate contributions for his second inauguration.

Many traditional advocacy organizations, including the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, are set up as social welfare groups, or 501(c)(4)'s in tax parlance. But unlike those groups, Organizing for Action appears to be an extension of the administration, stocked with alumni of Mr. Obama's White House and campaign teams and devoted solely to the president's second-term agenda.

Robert K. Kelner, a Republican election lawyer who works with other outside groups, said the arrangement "presents a rather simple loophole in the otherwise incredibly complex web of government ethics regulations that are intended to insulate government officials from outside influence."

The closest precedents for Organizing for Action exist at the state level. In New Jersey, a 501(c)(4) called the Committee for Our Children's Future, set up by friends of Gov. Chris Christie, has run hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of advertising praising Mr. Christie's proposals.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo encouraged the formation of a nonprofit group, the Committee to Save New York, that is run by business leaders allied with him, and it has raised millions of dollars from corporations, private sector unions, and individuals. The group supported Mr. Cuomo's agenda — but it also thrust him into controversy when The New York Times revealed that gambling interests poured $2 million into the group as Mr. Cuomo was developing a proposal to expand casino gambling.

Organizing for Action said it would accept unlimited personal and corporate contributions, but no money from political action committees, lobbyists or foreign citizens. Officials said they would focus — for now — on grass-roots organizing, amplified by Internet advertising. Friday's "day of action" involved half a million dollars' worth of targeted Internet ads and events in Florida, Maine, Pennsylvania and California, among other states.

"O.F.A.'s first day of action was about bringing the issue of closing background-check loopholes into communities across the country that feel very strongly about supporting the president's plan to reduce gun violence," said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for the group.

Organizing for Action has also promised to steer clear of electoral politics, unlike the politically active nonprofit groups like the right-leaning Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies and Americans for Prosperity. Such groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising during the recent election campaign season, ostensibly for issue advocacy, spurring a wave of lawsuits, ethics complaints from campaign watchdogs and criticism from Mr. Obama himself.

But the distinction between campaigning and issue advocacy may be hard for Organizing for Action to maintain in the prelude to the 2014 elections, especially if it continues its emphasis on pressing lawmakers on delicate issues like immigration and guns.

In Wednesday's conference call, Mr. Carson said the group hoped to form partnerships with other 501(c)(4) groups on the left, including America Votes, which was at the center of Democratic efforts to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and now serves as a coordinator for progressive advocacy organizations. He also said Organizing for Action wanted to be a counterweight to grass-roots organizations on the right, like the N.R.A., according to people who took part in the call.

There should be "as much of a price to pay if you tick off the gun violence people" as there is for angering the N.R.A., Mr. Carson said, according to those people. "Let's build an organization that means that Republicans are embarrassed to have climate change deniers running for office."

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

"Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews," said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

"Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days," said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. "They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don't do that. They get out of there as soon as possible."

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force's preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported "high operational stress." Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

"The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance," she said.

And, as investigators seek to uncover why the corporation canceled a Newsnight broadcast alleging that a once-beloved BBC personality who had recently died had in fact been a serial pedophile who preyed on vulnerable girls, everyone involved is scrambling to deflect blame onto someone else.

These and other unflattering details about the inner workings of Britain's public broadcaster emerged Friday when the BBC released some 3,000 pages of internal documents — e-mails, memos and transcripts of interviews — from an external investigation into why the program, about the BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, had been canceled.

In all, the documents painted a picture of a highly dysfunctional, top-heavy organization divided into discrete, rival factions, and weighed down by mistrust, poor communication, buck-passing and internecine squabbling.

There were no startling revelations; all those came out in the so-called Pollard report into the Savile affair, which was published in December and which concluded that there were deep structural problems in the BBC. But the supporting documents released Friday shed light on just what Nick Pollard, who prepared the report, meant by his scathing critique, said John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons culture and media committee.

"It demonstrates the extent of unhappiness within the BBC structure, the frustration at the bureaucratic nature of the management, and the generally poor state of morale," Mr. Whittingdale said in a television interview.

Referring to the fact that material in some of the newly released documents was blacked out, apparently because of concerns that it might give rise to lawsuits, Mr. Whittingdale added: "The fact that so much of the evidence can't be published, because we are told the lawyers have advised it could be defamatory, in a sense tells its own story."

Large portions of the testimony of Jeremy Paxman, a blunt-talking Newsnight host who is known for his testy and combative interview style, for instance, are blacked out in places where it appears he is about to make personal remarks about other people.

And in an annoyingly tantalizing instance, Peter Horrocks, director of global news, declares: "It is no secret that ..." What follows has been redacted, however, so that it is in fact a secret.

Lord McAlpine, a former Tory cabinet minister who, in another debacle at Newsnight, was unjustly accused of being a pedophile in a report that was broadcast, said that the BBC should not have left out any material. "The BBC is not the Secret Service, for Christ's sake," he told The Daily Telegraph.

But the BBC defended the redactions. Tim Davie, the acting director general, said that "97 percent plus of all the thousands of pages are out there."

In an interview with an off-camera interlocutor that was broadcast on the BBC Web site, Mr. Davie continued: "We are not redacting or taking out material that is embarrassing or uncomfortable to the BBC. We have simply taken out stuff that external lawyers saw as a clear risk."

He did not make himself available for interviews with other news organizations on Friday — indeed, no one from the BBC did. That strategy was roundly ridiculed by the broadcaster's rivals.

On Twitter, Ben de Pear, editor of Channel 4 News, said that over his career he had successfully coaxed interviews out of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. "We are still trying for Tim Davie," he said.

Much of the material focused on who said what to whom, and when, during Newsnight's investigations into the allegations against Mr. Savile — and during the subsequent decision to cancel the broadcast. But there were also general interviews with many key figures in the corporation about what was wrong and how to fix it.

The testimony of Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, was particularly sharp, as he described the chaotic flow of information, the preponderance of high-ranking officials (the BBC had "more senior leaders than China," he said) and the general mistrust within the corporation. "Is a lesson I should take from this that I can't believe it when I'm told things by the next director general, that I have to query everything he says or the director of news says to me or whatever?" he asked rhetorically.

No, he said in response. "With the next director general I won't — or his senior colleagues — I won't begin every conversation on the assumption that he or she or they may not be telling me the whole truth," he said. "I will want to be more convinced that there is a structure in place which ensures that the truth is being told."

The cause was cancer, his family said.

A lawyer and political scientist, Mr. Westin was at his death emeritus professor of public law at Columbia, where he had taught for nearly 40 years.

Through his work — notably his book "Privacy and Freedom," published in 1967 and still a canonical text — Mr. Westin was considered to have created, almost single-handedly, the modern field of privacy law. He testified frequently on the subject before Congress, spoke about it on television and radio and wrote about it for newspapers and magazines.

"He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis," Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "He transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others."

Since the first hominid grunted gossip about the hominid next door, every new communications medium has entailed new impingements on privacy. In a seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, were the first to articulate privacy as a legal right, defining it as "the right to be let alone."

Brandeis and Warren were concerned primarily with covert photography; later scholarship, including work by Mr. Westin in the 1950s, centered on things like illegal wiretapping.

But by the 1960s and '70s, as the widespread computerization of legal, financial, medical and other personal records loomed, technology had outrun the law.

Reproductive rights cases of the period — including the landmark Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — held that the Constitution protected an individual's right to privacy in matters of the human body, including contraceptive use and abortion rights. But the law was largely silent on the question of how personal data might be used by government or the private sector.

During these years, long before the personal computer and longer still before the Internet, Mr. Westin set out to codify just this kind of privacy for the modern age.

"He knew social history, and he could appreciate the directions that the technology was pushing the social contract," Lance J. Hoffman, the director of George Washington's Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, said in an interview.

Individuals, Mr. Westin argued in "Privacy and Freedom," have the right to determine how much of their personal information is disclosed and to whom, how it should be maintained and how disseminated.

"This concept became the cornerstone of our modern right to privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. "Part of 'Privacy and Freedom' is the argument that privacy enables freedom."

"Privacy and Freedom" received two prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award and the Hillman Prize.

The book, along with other work by Mr. Westin, is widely considered the foundation of a spate of modern privacy laws, among them the Privacy Act of 1974, the first law to delimit the gathering and use of personal information by the federal government.

Mr. Westin was no absolutist. In his early work on wiretapping, for instance, he condoned its use in certain instances, including cases where national security was at stake.

His argument prefigured the current national debate about privacy engendered by post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act, which Mr. Westin, in a 2003 interview, called "a justified piece of legislation."

"He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance," Mr. Rosen said. "Much of his work in the 1960s and '70s appears so prescient after 9/11 and in the age of Internet."

When it came to the use of consumers' personal data by corporations, Mr. Westin also steered a middle course. Consumers were entitled to withhold such data, he argued, but were equally entitled, if they wished, to have it used to alert them to products and services targeted to their interests. (This stance caused Mr. Westin to be accused by some critics of allying himself too closely with business interests.)

Mr. Westin, who in the 1970s was editor in chief of The Civil Liberties Review, a publication of the American Civil Liberties Foundation, published and edited the newsletter Privacy & American Business from 1993 to 2006. He was a consultant on privacy issues to major corporations, including Equifax, the consumer credit reporting giant; GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical concern; and Verizon Communications.

Mr. Westin's wife died before him, as did a son, David. His survivors include a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Debra Westin; and three grandchildren.

A posthumous book by Mr. Westin, about privacy as a historically and philosophically Jewish construct, is being completed by Mr. Rosen.

In recent years, Mr. Westin turned his attention to the Niagara of personal data loosed by Google, Facebook and their ilk. Trying to stem this tide was a hopeless task, and he knew it.

"He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can't be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions," Mr. Rosen said.

The son of Irving Westin and the former Etta Furman, Alan Furman Westin was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1929; received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1948, followed by a law degree from Harvard in 1951; was admitted to the bar in 1952; married Bea Shapoff, a teacher, in 1954 in a ceremony in which the bride wore a waltz-length white gown; joined the Columbia faculty in 1959; earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1965 (his dissertation topic was "Privacy in Western Political History"); lived for many years in Teaneck, N.J.; edited a string of books, including "Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America" (1964), "Information Technology in a Democracy" (1971) and "Getting Angry Six Times a Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons" (1979); once made a sound recording titled "I Wonder Who's Bugging You Now"; was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Congress; had a Social Security number obtained in Massachusetts; and was a registered Democrat who last voted in 2011 — all public information, obtainable online at the touch of a button or two.

One tank was already known to have a leak, but the new revelation caught state officials by surprise, said David Postman, a spokesman for the governor. He said that federal managers had assured the governor that the leaks posed no health risks or threats to the water supply, including the Columbia River, which passes nearby.

But Mr. Postman said it was also unclear how long the additional tanks have been leaking. What federal officials called a "data analysis" revealed the problem, Mr. Postman said. Hanford was built in the 1940s for the Manhattan Project, then continued on for decades through the cold war as a manufacturing site for the nuclear arsenal.

The Department of Energy, Mr. Inslee said in a statement, "did not adequately analyze data it had that would have shown the other tanks that are leaking."

Political leaders in Washington State and Oregon were already on high alert about Hanford as new worries about the site's pollutants combined with concerns about federal budgets, especially if automatic spending cuts — the sequestration threat hanging over Congress — kick in, affecting the cleanup budget.

The Department of Energy, which oversees the site, said last week that one of the 177 tanks at the site was leaking radioactive waste liquids at a rate of 150 to 300 gallons per year. The department said then that the tank, which holds approximately 447,000 gallons of sludge, was the first one documented to be losing liquids since interim stabilization of Hanford's tanks was completed in 2005.

Mr. Inslee, who took office last month, said after the first leak was announced that he was "alarmed and deeply concerned."