NSA deleting hundreds of millions of call records, raising questions about surveillance program’s viability

[steven36]

The National Security Agency (NSA) is purging what appears to be hundreds of millions of phone records collected by U.S. telecom companies that the agency had acquired since 2015.

 

National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland

 

 

The National Security Agency (NSA) is purging what appears to be hundreds of millions of phone records collected by U.S. telecom companies that the agency had acquired since 2015.

The agency released a statement on Thursday saying it began deleting records in May after "analysts noted technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers."

The records date back to 2015 and were obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

 

The statement added that "the root cause of the problem has since been addressed" for future call record collecting.

 

In a written follow-up statement to the Associated Press, the NSA said it is "following a specific court-authorized process," but technical irregularities resulted in the production of some call records that the NSA "was not authorized to receive."

 

The NSA faced a legal battle surrounding its Internet surveillance data collection program in 2017, when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union could move forward.

 

David Kris, a member of the Justice Department during the Obama administration, told the New York Times that the agency's announcement represents a "failure" of the Obama administration to properly implement the Freedom Act, a surveillance law passed in 2015 after the controversial Patriot Act expired.

 

Others placed the blame elsewhere. 

 

“Telecom companies hold vast amounts of private data on Americans,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told the Times. “This incident shows these companies acted with unacceptable carelessness, and failed to comply with the law when they shared customers’ sensitive data with the government."

 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

Source

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

NSA Extends Its Streak Of Surveillance Violations To Fourteen Years With Its Latest Announcement

from the let's-hear-it-for-the-good-guys! dept

There isn't a surveillance program or authority the NSA hasn't abused and yet it's still humming along, hoovering up data and communications while mostly useless Congress folks pretend to be in the oversight business. Section 702, the "about" program, Section 215… all of these have received judicial smackdowns and the occasional Congressional nastygram, but the only thing that's changed is the NSA's willingness to admit its failures.

Consistent with NSA’s core values of respect for the law, accountability, integrity, and transparency we are making public notice that on May 23, 2018, NSA began deleting all call detail records (CDRs) acquired since 2015 under Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

2015 would be the date the control of phone records shifted back to phone companies and the FISA court began demanding articulable suspicion for specific targets before the NSA could even ask phone companies for records. Prior to that, the NSA had collected phone records from telcos in bulk, using its internal tools to limit itself to targeted searches of compiled haystacks. The USA Freedom Act effectively ended this part of the Section 215 program, forcing the NSA to target first and ask for only records related to its targets.

Apparently, it can't even do this right.

NSA is deleting the CDRs because several months ago NSA analysts noted technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers. These irregularities also resulted in the production to NSA of some CDRs that NSA was not authorized to receive. Because it was infeasible to identify and isolate properly produced data, NSA concluded that it should not use any of the CDRs. Consequently, NSA, in consultation with the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, decided that the appropriate course of action was to delete all CDRs.

Whatever was broken on the tech end is now apparently fixed. All oversight has been notified and the collection of records (via telcos) will continue. I guess our three-year national nightmare is over and the NSA is finally on the road to recov---

Last year, I did a report that catalogued all the times NSA had violated FISA since the Stellar Wind phone dragnet got moved under FISA in 2004. There were the five different practices deemed violations of 1809(a)(2), which prohibits the use of any data that was illegally collected.

[...]

In addition to those, NSA had continued to conduct back door searches of data collected using upstream 702 collection even after John Bates prohibited the practice in 2011.

[...]

While Rosemary Collyer (who is the worst presiding FISA Judge ever) didn’t deem that a violation of 1809(a)(2) — meaning NSA didn’t have to segregate and destroy andy data collected improperly — it still violated the minimization procedures that control 702 collection.

So between 2004 and 2016, NSA was always breaking the rules of FISA in one way or another.

And we can now extend that timeline to 2018.

Thanks, Marcy Wheeler, for clearing that up. This is just a continuance of the NSA's inability to run its programs in a technically-capable manner, much less with an eye on the Constitution. Muted applause for taking this oversight before the few members who give a shit start asking questions, but why aren't we (and by "we," I mean the people who could actually do something about it) expecting more from an well-funded agency with vast technical knowledge? Sure, an apology is better than a plausible denial, but it's been 14 years of failure after failure. Where's the improvement? Or is national security just one of those things that's too important to be done properly? We just need to have it done, no matter how many violations occur in the process? I fear that's how most of the NSA's oversight actually feels: the ends justify the badly-broken means.

 

Source

 

 

[Atasas]

Geepers creepers! Who pays for their "work"?

 

[steven36]

18 minutes ago, Atasas said:

Geepers creepers! Who pays for their "work"?

 

The taxpayers  do just like anything to do with the federal government . Fake money i guess  because the government is broke. Bush created the Patriot Act  it caused the deficit

 to sore . And after they passed the freedom act in 2015  instead of cutting back on programs like the NSA has witch was the law that they do it.  Obama done what he always done witch was nothing and holds the record for the largest deficit of any President so far.

 

Quote

 

President Obama had the largest deficits. By the end of his final budget, FY 2017, his deficits were $6.690 trillion. Obama took office during the Great Recession. He immediately needed to spend billions to stop it. He convinced Congress to add the $787 billion economic stimulus package to Bush’s FY 2009 budget. This added $253 billion to the FY 2009 budget. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act added another $534 billion over the rest of Obama’s terms.

In 2010, the Obama tax cut added $858 billion to the debt in its first two years. Obama increased defense spending, adding as much as $800 billion a year. Federal income decreased due to lower tax receipts from the 2008 financial crisis.

Both Presidents Bush and Obama suffered from higher mandatory spending than their predecessors did. Social Security and Medicare benefits were eating up more of the budget. Health care costs were rising as the American population aged. In 2010, Obama launched the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It sought to reduce health care spending. This reduction would lower the debt by $143 billion by 2020. In total, $983 billion was added to the national debt under Obama.

 

 

https://www.thebalance.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-deficits-hide-3306151

[Archanus]

They have deleted those millions of calls maybe because those were useless :S