The Daily Beast
The National Security Agency has admitting to improperly collecting what appears to be hundreds of millions of phone records from Americans, casting doubt that the principal restriction Congress imposed after Edward Snowden’s revelations has significantly inhibited the surveillance behemoth.
In a statement released Thursday saying it has deleted the data wholesale, the agency said it had on its own discovered that telecommunications firms had been providing NSA with records of Americans’ phone calls or texts that it “was not authorized to receive.” The discovery occurred “several months ago.” Echoing previous explanations for overcollection, NSA said unspecified “technical irregularities” were to blame.
Citing similarly unspecified technical reasons why it cannot distinguish between legally and illegally acquired phone data, NSA opted to delete “all” such data “acquired since 2015” under a post-Snowden update to a crucial surveillance law.
“We did not receive any content, geolocation data, or financial data,” Chris Augustine, an NSA spokesman, told The Daily Beast.
Despite the sweeping remedy for the overcollection, the NSA did not estimate how many records it had purged, let alone how many Americans were affected. The scale is certain to be massive. According to an April report from the director of national intelligence, under the USA FREEDOM Act, NSA collected 685 million call records over two years.
“We’re talking about hundreds of millions of records,” said Julian Sanchez, a surveillance scholar at the Cato Institute.
“Over
and over again, NSA says we don’t have to worry because these
violations are inadvertent. [But] they’re persistently failing to adhere
to the legal limits.”
— Liza Goitein
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