At Long Last, NSA Finally Recommends Its Bulk Phone Collection Program Be Put Out Of Its Misery

from the DNR-please dept

Early last month, it appeared the NSA was ready to shut down its bulk phone records collection. The subject of the first Snowden leak was argued to be an essential part of the national security process, but as it underwent significant modifications, the NSA seemed willing to sacrifice a program of dwindling value to save its more intrusive collections.

This perhaps inadvertent revelation came via a podcast, which is just the way things are done these days. Appearing on the Lawfare podcast, national security advisor Luke Murry had this to say about the Section 215 phone records collection:

Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration “hasn’t actually been using it for the past six months.” “I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up,” Mr. Murry said.

NSA abandonware. That's one for the history books. This comment has now received official backup from the NSA, which has informed its oversight that it's not really interested in continuing this surveillance program.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has formally recommended that the White House drop the phone surveillance program that collects information about millions of US phone calls and text messages. The Wall Street Journal reports that people familiar with the matter say the logistical and legal burdens of maintaining the program outweigh any intelligence benefits it brings.

The program's alterations -- courtesy of the USA Freedom Act -- now require the NSA to provide reasonable, articulable suspicion prior to asking for records from phone companies. The phone companies simply return responsive records, rather than hand over call data on all calls to the agency for it to sort through at its leisure. The NSA claims "logistical and legal" issues make this program not worth continuing. Perhaps it's actually the evidentiary burden that's making this too much of a hassle -- more "legal" than "logistical."

Whatever the case, it's up to Congress to officially dump the program. The NSA may not be currently collecting anything, but its guidance could be ignored by non-national security experts on Capitol Hill who may be less willing to shitcan domestic surveillance programs.

In a recent interview, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "If we have technical problems or challenges that NSA has to take into account, that's okay... It's not something we easily shelve."

If the NSA wants to kill the program, it behooves Congress to preside over its funeral. The best eulogy for the mostly-useless program would be codification of its overdue mortal coil offloading.

A group of bipartisan lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill that would end the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass collection of U.S. phone data. The bill's introduction by a group of civil libertarian lawmakers comes weeks after a national security aide to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) revealed that the NSA has shuttered its call-detail records program. The Ending Mass Collection of Americans’ Phone Records Act would end the program for good, taking away the NSA's authority to restart it. The bill was introduced by privacy hawks Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).

It seems like an easy sale. The NSA isn't going to be pushing back on this one. The only opposition will be reps like Burr who seem to think they know national security better than the National Security Agency.

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Filed Under: bulk surveillance, mass surveillance, metadata, nsa, phone records, richard burr, section 215, surveillance