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The National Security Agency is in the process of removing more than 685 million call records that the government has obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies under the Surveys, which raises questions about the viability of the program. Mass collection of call records was initially restricted by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government oversight. The law, promulgated in June 2015, stipulated that in the future, the data would be kept by the telecommunication companies, not by the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could interrogate the database. massive data.
Now the NSA Deletes All Information Collected The agency released a statement Thursday saying that it began deleting records in May after NSA analysts noted "technical irregularities in certain data received from telecommunication service providers. " She also said that the irregularities According to David Kris, a former senior official of national security at the Ministry of Justice
"They said that they had to serve three years". value of the data going back to 2015, and that the data they have collected during this period and that they are now serving were not reliable and were infected by a technical error "said Kris, founder from Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. "So, whatever point of view they hoped to get in the last three years of this collection program … is all worthless, because of that, they throw away all the data and start over." "
Christopher Augustine, a spokesman for the NSA, disagreed with the statement that the program had failed.
" This is a case where the NSA has determined that "this incident shows that these companies acted with unacceptable recklessness and did not abide by the law when they communicated sensitive customer data to the government., "He told The Associated Press in a statement. written declaration Friday.
Under the law, the government may request information, such as the type of details that could be printed on a phone bill: the date and time of a call or text a card number phone call, the duration of a call and the phone number to which it was made. The details provided to the government do not include the contents of the communications, the name, address or financial information of a customer, the location of the cell site or the site. GPS information.
If government investigators reasonably suspect that a certain phone number is being used by a terrorist, who could be in the United States or abroad, the government is asking the phone companies whose other numbers have been in contact with the suspicious number something known as the "first jump" and then the numbers are in contact with these numbers, The NSA has collected more than 534.4 million details of calls and text messages in 2017 US telecommunications providers like AT & T and Version, according to the latest government report covering the NSA's surveillance activities that year. This is more than three times the 151.2 million collected in 2016.
The call recordings were part of an intelligence gathering effort targeting 42 targets in 2016 and 40 targets in 2017, according to the report. It defines a target as an individual, group of individuals, organization or entity.
Congressional annual reports from the intelligence community are now required under the Surveillance Reform Act, 2015. The law also requires the government to apply for a court order to collect the records of calls in order to obtain information. Applications for US citizen records must be based on an investigation conducted to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and the investigation can only be conducted on activities protected by the First Amendment.
However, despite the reforms, NSA Augustine said that some data from telecom companies that the agency was not allowed to view and some of these data were wrong.
"We can not go into detail because these details remain classified.However, the NSA has not received at any time the contents of the calls, the name, the address or the address. financial information of a subscriber or a customer, neither cell location information or global positioning system information. "Rights advocates stated that the NSA's announcement raised Other Concerns About the Program
"This is another series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have exploded and failed repeatedly. the FISA court, "said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.Guliani was referring to a US federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee applications
She said that the public has the right to know more about the cause and the magnitude of the problem, as the number of files were obtained by mistake and if the NSA notified people that their information was improperly in the hands of the agency.
The agency reviewed and rechecked the intelligence report to make sure it was based only on call data it was properly received from telecom providers, he said.The agency refused to assign blame, and said that "the root cause of the problem has since been dealt with. "[19659003SenRonWydenD-OreAstrongadvocateforprivacyrightsblamedtelecommunicationscompaniesforprovidingtheNSAwithcallrecords
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