Big Brother’s reach continues to extend. It was good under Obama but bad under Trump. I need a scorecard.
The NSA retired its old surveillance program that indiscriminately inhaled billions of phone logs a day back in 2015, but that doesn’t meant it’s no longer collecting call data. According to a transparency report (PDF) released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency got its hands on 534 million call and text records from telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon in 2017. That’s over three times the number (151 million) it collected in 2016, which was the first full year since new surveillance rules under the USA Freedom Act took effect.
While the NSA can no longer scoop up everyone’s info, phone companies have to keep call and text metadata, including phone numbers, call duration and number of characters in texts, under the new law. The NSA can then put in a request to access all the records of its targets and everyone they’ve been in contact with. Before the agency can get those records, though, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has to agree that the main target can reasonably be linked to terrorist activities.
Since the whole process sounds quite complex, these new numbers have alarmed privacy advocates. Robyn Greene from Washington-based Open Technology Institute told Reuters that “[t]he intelligence community’s transparency has yet to extend to explaining dramatic increases in their collection.” Office of the Director of National Intelligence spokesperson Timothy Barrett, however, defended the NSA and said that it “has not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records.”
NSA tripled its phone record collection in 2017
While the NSA can no longer scoop up everyone’s info, phone companies have to keep call and text metadata, including phone numbers, call duration and number of characters in texts, under the new law. The NSA can then put in a request to access all the records of its targets and everyone they’ve been in contact with.