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WASHINGTON – The National Security Agency is in the process of removing more than 685 million records of calls that the government has obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies under the umbrella of. inquiries, raising questions about the viability of the program. The bulk collection of the NSA records of appeals 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 retained by the telecommunications companies, not by the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the database. massive data.
Now, the NSA deletes all the information it has collected from the queries.
The agency issued a statement Thursday night saying it had begun deleting registrations in May after NSA analysts had noted "technical irregularities in some data received from service providers." telecommunication". He also stated that the irregularities led the NSA to obtain certain details of appeal that it was not allowed to receive.
This indicates a program failure, according to David Kris, former senior national security official at the Department of Justice.
"They said that they had to purge three years of data dating back to 2015, and that the data they collected during that time – which they are now serving – was unreliable and have been infected by some kind of technical mistake, "said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. "So, everything they hoped to get in the last three years from this collection program … is worthless, because of that, they throw away all the data and start over."
Christopher Augustine, a spokesman for the NSA, did not agree with the statement that the program had failed.
"This is a case in which the NSA determined that there was a problem and took all appropriate measures to remedy it," he said.
The agency reviewed and revalidated the intelligence report to ensure that it was based solely on the call data that had been correctly received from telecommunications providers, a- he said. The agency refused to attribute blame, and said that "the root cause of the problem has been taken into account".
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., A staunch advocate for privacy rights, blamed the telcos who provided the NSA with call records.
"This incident shows that these companies acted with an unacceptable recklessness and did not comply with the law when they communicated the sensitive data of their customers to the government," he said on Friday. to the Associated Press.
According to the law, the government can request information, such as the type of details that could be printed on a phone bill: the date and time of a call or a text, a phone number, the duration of a call and what phone number 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 asks the telephone companies what other numbers have been in contact with the suspicious number – something known as the "first jumps" – and then which numbers are in contact with these numbers, the "second jumps".
The NSA has collected more than 534.4 million details of calls and text messages in 2017 from US telecommunications providers like AT & T and Version, according to the latest government report covering surveillance activities of the NSA this year. That was more than three times the 151.2 million collected in 2016.
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 a survey conducted to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and the investigation can not be conducted solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.
However, despite the reforms, the NSA has always received data from telecom companies that the agency was not allowed to view and some of this data was wrong, Augustine said.
"We can not go into detail as this information remains confidential, but at no time has the NSA received the contents of the calls, the name, the address or the financial information of the company. a subscriber or customer, or information on the global positioning system, "he said.
Privacy and civil rights advocates said that the announcement The NSA raised further concerns about the program.
"This is another series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have exploded and have repeatedly failed to respect the basic limits imposed by Congress and the FISA Court, "said Neema Singh Guliani 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 the dema
She said that the public has a right to know more about the cause and the scope of the problem, such as the number of documents obtained in error and whether the NSA has informed individuals that their information was incorrectly in the hands of the agency.
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