NSA ends mass phone surveillance program under USA Freedom Act

It comes two and a half years after the controversial program was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Hypothetically, for every single global call that had been picked up under the Section 215 dragnet and more (at a minimum, because NSA collects phone records overseas with location information), a matching record has been and will continue to be collected overseas, under EO 12333.

A secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been supervising the NSA program since 2006 and NSA experts said they only accessed phone data in order to hunt for suspects in anti-terrorism investigations.

The program has been scrapped and replaced with a newer, more restricted, surveillance system. The White House shared the news last Friday, making a lot of people, tech companies, and privacy advocates happy.

Marking the end of the 9/11 era, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement this week that as of November 29, “the government is prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk under Section 215, including both U.S. and non-U.S. persons”.

The government also recently complied with another important requirement of USA FREEDOM.

On June 2, 2015, Congress passed and the President signed the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. Beginning Sunday, November 29, the government is prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk under Section 215, including of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons.

The overall volume of call detail records subject to query pursuant to court order is greater under USA FREEDOM Act.

Based on a recommendation from the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General, and after carefully considering the available options, in particular accepting one of the key recommendations of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, the President announced in March 2014 that the government should no longer acquire this data in bulk. It is modest change but it is at least a change, raising public awareness of the scale of government surveillance and opening the way for privacy campaigners to chip away in hopes of further reforms.

Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) hailed the end of the program as “a victory for everyone who believes in protecting both American security and Americans’ constitutional rights”.