The NSA surveillance ended after a new law, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, enacted by President Barack Obama was passed in June and entered into effect early Sunday. Yet some worry that the government could take advantage of legal loopholes and still retrieve such data by collecting it from overseas, reports ZDNet.
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That debate quieted some after last summer’s passage of the USA Freedom Act, which ended the so-called 215 provision that allowed sweeping collection of Americans’ telephone records and Internet metadata. The NSA’s compilation of citizen’s phone data was kept a secret until 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked the program’s existence to the world.
Some privacy advocates are also concerned that the government may find ways to get around the privacy protections built into the USA Freedom Act. On November 25, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court designated five individuals as eligible to serve as amicus curiae, that is, “friends of the court”. This could mean the new method (approaching phone companies directly) may give the NSA access to records it couldn’t obtain under Section 215, like additional cellphone records or other communications methods like VOIP. This further ensures that collection of information for intelligence purposes is appropriately focused and targeted, and is limited to information that telephone service providers have historically used for their internal billing and operational needs. The agency was required by the USA Freedom Act to stop its whole scale phone metadata harvesting program and is now expected to request warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for specific individuals or groups.
Lawmakers hoping to reopen the NSA’s door for mass data collection will most likely have to wait until after the November 2016 Presidential election, especially since a Presidential review committee reported that the surveillance program didn’t produce any useful counter terrorism information. The FISC is now considering this request.
This month, however, a federal court found the collection and storage program to be unconstitutional.
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The phone records preserved exclusively for legal obligations will not be used or accessed for any other objective, officials said, and the NSA will destroy them as soon as possible after the legal obligations end, the ODNI said.
