The National Security Agency on Sunday will end its mass collection of data about Americans’ phone calls, 14 years after the counterterrorism program began in secret under the authority of President George W. Bush.
The halt was ordered by Congress, which in June passed the USA Freedom Act to ban the controversial collection of information known as metadata. That data includes the dates and durations of phone calls and logs of call times, but not content.
Under the new law, the NSA must obtain a court order to serve on the phone companies for every phone number or account it wants information on.
President Obama in January 2014 called on Congress to come up with a way to end the bulk collection of phone metadata, saying that although he had seen no evidence of abuse by the NSA, the program lessened trust in the government.
The government had kept the program mostly secret for years. But in the summer of 2013 it was forced to acknowledge it following the leak of a court order by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showing that the agency was gathering from a Verizon phone company “all call detail records” of its customers on a daily basis.
The revelation touched off a contentious two-year debate about the proper scope of government surveillance.
Although the phone metadata program had been placed under court supervision in 2006, that action, too, was secret. The public — and many lawmakers, apparently — did not know the vast scope of the collection or the legal authority it was based on.
Following the leak, the government revealed it had interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act in a way that allowed such bulk collection. The reasoning essentially held that all records were needed in the event that one day some of them might prove useful in foiling a terrorist plot.
Under the USA Freedom Act, the government must report annually to Congress and the public, among other things, the total number of orders issued under the new authority and the number of targets of such orders.
The NSA has requested access to historical phone metadata until Feb. 29, limited to technical personnel and only for the purpose of verifying that the new system is working as intended, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is considering the request.
Separately, the ODNI said, the NSA remains under a legal obligation to preserve the phone metadata it has collected until civil litigation regarding the program is resolved, or the relevant courts relieve the NSA of such obligations. The NSA and the Justice Department have declined to state whether that means they will preserve all the records or just those that are relevant to the litigation.
The phone records preserved solely for legal obligations will not be used or accessed for any other purpose, officials said, and the NSA will destroy them as soon as possible after the legal obligations end, the ODNI said.
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