The decision comes as a victory to privacy advocates, who anxious that the winding down of the mass surveillance program under a reform law enacted earlier this year could have allowed the NSA to continue to access phone records it had already collected. Instead, those metadata records – such as the time a call was made, to whom it was made, and the duration of the call – will held by the telephone companies, and the NSA will be required to submit specific search terms in order to request relevant data, after obtaining a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Advertisement
Historic phone records collected in bulk by the National Security Agency are poised to be purged from the NSA’s database later this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said this week. On Monday, the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement those records would no longer be examined in terrorism investigations after November 29, and would be destroyed as soon as possible. The program came to light when former agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that millions of American’s calling records had been collected. That six-month period will end on November 29, and intelligence analysts will be barred from accessing the archive from that date, the ODNI stated. After those three months, that access will cease, too.
Shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA began collecting American phone metadata. Though it did not specify which cases, the statement appears to refer to cases brought forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that have claimed that the bulk-surveillance program was unconstitutional and not statutorily authorized.
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 NSA was given a grace period of six months to transition its programs to the new law.
Advertisement
The data kept for litigation “will not be used or accessed for any other goal, and, as soon as possible, NSA will destroy the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata upon expiration of its litigation preservation obligations”. In reality, however, a number of “technical personnel” will be able to access the database “solely for data integrity purposes”, just to the records produced from that comply with the Freedom Act’s requirements.
