According to sources: the disputed NSA wiretapping program has been curtailed

The NSA quietly covered up a system that analyzes the internal logs of Americans’s calls and SMS and stopped the program, which was the beginning of a stormy discussion about privacy and the rule of law after the sad events of 09/11/2001.

The NSA has not used this system for several months, and the Trump administration will most likely not ask Congress for permission to extend this program, which expires at the end of this year.

In a rude statement of his executive power, the administration of President George W. Bush launched a program as part of his intense persecution of conspirators Al-Qaeda (a banned organization in the Russian Federation), for several weeks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and subsequently the court secretly blessed her.

An American technician and special agent, a former NSA employee, talked about the existence of a wiretap program in 2013, shocking the public and fostering a growing awareness of how governments and private companies collect and use personal data.

The way that intelligence analysts gained access to the mass data of the Americans' phone calls and SMS logs has changed a little, but the goal was the same: they analyze social connections to find all the people suspected of terrorism.

Intelligence agencies can use the search technique on data obtained using other means, such as collecting data from foreign telephone networks (which are in the Echelon-2 system), where there are fewer legal restrictions. But these approaches do not offer the same systematic access to the contents of telephone calls within the United States.

The US Congress discontinued and replaced the program disclosed by Snowden with the United States Freedom Act of 2015, which expires in December. Defenders of rights and freedoms are preparing for a legislative fight against expanding or revising the program - and with what changes, if any.

Mr. Merry, who is an adviser to California representative Kevin McCarthy, over the weekend expressed doubts about the need for this debate. His comments were made during a podcast for Lawfare's national security site.

Mr. Merry raised the issue of the expiration of the Freedom Act, but then said that the Trump administration “has not actually used it for the past six months.”

“In fact, I'm not sure that the administration will want to start this,” Mr. Merry said.
He referred to the problems that the NSA had revealed last year. “Technical violations” polluted the agency’s database with messages that he did not have the right to collect, so officials deleted hundreds of millions of logs of phone calls and text messages received from US telecommunications firms.

Since “the sky did not fall” without a program, he said, the intelligence community should justify the need for its revival - if, indeed, the NSA believes that it is worth the effort to continue to try to make it work,
the Phone Log Analysis program has never prevented a terrorist attack, and this fact arose during the debate after Snowden.

The NSA used records with detailed information about calls - this is metadata showing who and when they called, but not the content of what was said - as a map of social networks, analyzing connections between people to identify people suspected of terrorism.

The phone call analysis system dates back to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration created the secret Stellarwind tracking program. One of the components was connected with the mass collection of logs of internal telephone calls of Americans.

Companies such as AT&T and MCI, which later became part of Verizon, first passed records of their customers in response to an order from President Bush. Since 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Court has begun to issue secret orders requiring companies to participate, based on a new interpretation of Article 215 of the Patriotic Act, in which, as stated by the FBI, it may receive records that are “relevant” to the investigation of terrorism.

In June 2013, the program became known after The Guardian published the first of many secret files provided by Snowden - a top secret Verizon Court order to provide records of calls from its customers.

The disclosure, one of the most significant for Snowden, provoked sharp criticism of the state theory of why it was legal: in fact, all telephone records were relevant, because the investigating authorities had to find all the needles in the haystack. The Court of Appeal later rejected this theory.

The Obama administration has come up with a plan to put an end to the massive collection of internal telephone data at the NSA, but to preserve the analytical capabilities of the old program, which led to the adoption of the 2015 Patriotic Act.

According to this law, the bulk of the records remained in the hands of telephone companies, not the government. But with the permission of the judge, the agency could quickly receive phone call logs and text messages of specific suspects, as well as all the people who were in contact with these suspects, even when they were clients of different telephone companies.

When replacing the system, the number of records of American ties that the agency collected was significantly reduced from the billions per day it previously received.

However, the scale of the collection remained enormous: in 2016, the program collected 151 million records, despite receiving court orders to use the system for only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, as well as a few remaining since the end of 2015. In 2017, she received orders for 40 targets and collected 534 million records.

The agency had neither the authority to collect their information, nor a practical way to view its large database and select those records that it should not have collected. As a result, the NSA decided to clear them all and start all over again.

Original publication.

Whenever I see that “ Patriotic Act ” or “ Act of Freedom"Related to the program coming from Washington, especially the Republicans, I know two things. Number two, it will be a complete failure, and number one, it will be a complete failure and illegal. TheOldPatroon (Pittsfield, MA).

If the NSA has not used this system for the past six months or so, you should only assume that a newer system is installed that allows the government to intercept all calls, text messages, video and audio from everyone in the country.
This makes me wonder if they have an AI from the series “Person of Interest”, where a self-aware computer system controls everything and collects everything. And if not, you know that it is only a matter of time before they do it. They have the technology to do it on an individual basis right now. The ability to access every device that works via WiFi in a people's house is very simple for a fairly large number of people, and I doubt it would be so difficult to design and program a system to do this on a massive scale. David Parchert (East Tawas, Michigan)

I wonder how they are going to use their big new shiny $ 1.2 billion Utah data warehouse. Joe B. (Center City)

How exactly can the public believe that the NSA will not continue to collect and use information when it did so long before it was disclosed by Snowdon? George spencer