In its Monday statement, the government said it would allow “technical personnel” access to the historic metadata for an additional three months after the six-month transition ends-a grace period to be used “solely for data integrity purposes to verify the records produced under the new targeted production authorized by the USA Freedom Act”. That question was answered today: Those old troves of metadata are mostly going in the garbage.
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The NSA programme collects and analyses data about Americans’ phone calls, such as the number dialled, and the time and length of the call, but not the calls’ actual content.
Technically, the NSA will cease to have access to that database starting the 29th of November.
Not everything will be scrubbed, however.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that the “bulk collection” of phone data the NSA illegally collected under Section 215 of the Patriot act will be locked away starting November 29, 2015. Better than not taking out the trash (I guess?) but a hollow gesture that completely fails to mitigate the negative effects of the original wrongdoing.
WASHINGTON (AP) The Obama administration has decided that the National Security Agency will soon stop examining and will ultimately destroy millions of American calling records it collected under a controversial program leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The fact that the NSA had been collecting American phone metadata came to light when former agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed it to journalists.
Additionally, the assertion stated NSA should protect bulk telephony metadata assortment “till civil litigation relating to this system is resolved, or the related courts relieve NSA of such obligations”.
The USA Freedom Act sought to roll back the powers of the NSA under the Patriot Act, and notably Section 215, which authorized a vast data sweep programme the agency said was aimed at tracking potential terrorists.
In a karmic stroke, the NSA will also be required to preserve the bulk of its bulk telephony metadata as evidence in any civil lawsuits against itself.
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The government “continues to claim that no one has standing to challenge the legality [of] these programs because no one can “prove” that their telephone records were included”, Cindy Cohn, executive director of digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Common Dreams.
