NSA ending bulk collection of US phone records

Correction: Story originally reported that this program would end at 11:59 on Sunday.

The U.S. intelligence community on Sunday will cease its bulk collection of telephone metadata.

The move comes two and a half years after the controversial programme was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Phone metadata include information such as phone numbers as well as the time and length of calls.

Rather than have the government collect and keep the records, under the Freedom Act, phone companies will now be expected to provide them to government agencies after reception of an intelligence court’s order based on a “specific selection term”. But in the summer of 2013, it was forced to acknowledge the program after Snowden’s leak of a court order showing that the agency was gathering from a phone company “all call detail records” of its customers on a daily basis.

“The act struck a reasonable compromise which allows us to continue to protect the country while implementing various reforms”, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

Metadata collected by the NSA over the past five years will be preserved for “data integrity purposes” through February 29, the White House said.

After the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier this month, however, some Republican lawmakers were seeking further preservation of the bulk metadata collection programme till 2017.

Reuters notes that any new surveillance measures are unlikely to become law before the 2016 elections next November.

The purported need for the federal government to record millions of Americans’ phone calls was debunked by a privacy and civil liberties review body, which could not find “a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation”.

After that the NSA will purge all of its historic records once pending litigation is resolved.