Four months from now, at the same time that the National Security Agency finally abandons the massive domestic telephone dragnet exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, it will also stop perusing the vast archive of data collected by the program.
The NSA announced on Monday that it will expunge all the telephone metadata it previously swept up, citing Section 215 of the U.S.A Patriot Act.
The program was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court in May. In June, Congress voted to end the program, but gave the NSA until the end of November to phase it out.
The historical metadata — records of American phone calls showing who called who, when, and for how long — will be put out of the reach of analysts on November 29, although technical personnel will have access for three more months. The program started 14 years ago, and operated under rules requiring data be retained for five years, and then destroyed.
The only possible hold-up, ironically, would be if any of the civil lawsuits prompted by the program prohibit the destruction of the data.
“The telephony metadata” will be “preserved solely because of preservation obligations in pending civil litigation,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced. “As soon as possible, NSA will destroy the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata upon expiration of its litigation preservation obligations.”
ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo told The Intercept his organization is “pleased that the NSA intends to purge the call records it has collected illegally.” But, he added: “Even with today’s pledge, the devil may be in the details.”
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly said that 14 years of data is to be destroyed. The program rules already required data to be destroyed after 5 years.
Photo: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
I am thinking that if US government agencies or corporations have processed NSA’s metadata and effectively propagated it elsewhere for say creating ‘selectors’ linking people to data, then destroying “archived metadata” might not mean much imo.
Destroying more evidence of perversion of justice, hmmmm?
See, I think GCHQ fished through Tempora to replace Cameron’s corrupt and disgraceful email with its metadata version. It was stored in a BB held in police custody long enough for that file to go metadata in Tempora so they could stuff it in Red Top’s BlackBerry…She carries a “HIllary.” Not subject to justice like you or me, see? Another Queen Bee?
Will they also kill everyone who worked in those programs too, Egyptian Pharaohs style?
Well, that wasn’t necessary when they did MKUltra …
Also, there new lies confirm what we always knew: they had always collected everything, not just “metadata”
RCL
We all know the fuckers are lying. Could they tell the truth even if their lives depended on it? Any time a government official or stooge makes a statement regarding foreign policy or domestic “security,” it should be automatically assumed to be a lie unless there is good reason to believe otherwise.
That being the case, on what grounds can anyone deceive himself and still call our government legitimate? No employer would ever tolerate serial lying by an employee. Aren’t we supposed to be the employers of our government?
The government of the fUSA is corrupt beyond repair. Voting will change nothing; as someone else put it, voting only changes the players, not the game. And “fUSA” is not a typo; it stands for “former USA.” We should all call this country the fUSA from now on, since the USA that once existed WAS defined by the Bill of Rights. Although the US has never truly lived up to its ideals, at least an effort was ostensibly made. That all went down the toilet over the past couple of decades, starting with the “War on Getting High Without Government Permission” and accelerating with the “War on Militants Not Sponsored or Approved by Western/Zionist Oligarchs.” Government in the fUSA no longer even pretends to consider the Bill of Rights to be the law of the land.
#fUSA Well said.
but, what is truth?
https://hsymbolicus.wordpress.com/category/poems/ (lies …)
~
“People are so easy to brainwash!” … know typesetters, cooks and
politicians, who, believing their own device, frame their “we”, still wall them in “theys”
and make us, futures and weapons following orders pay for our doubts;
keep asking (or saying?): “what is truth?” (and you wonder …),
while misleading all of our faiths, our faiths’ ways and compass,
leave that paradox, again and again, wondering about its naked self
~
RCL
BULLSHIT.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/07/27/i-con-the-record-drop-the-lawsuits-and-well-release-the-data-hostages/
Marcy Wheeler: The ACLU moved for an injunction against the dragnet, which not only might have led to the Second Circuit ordering the government to purge ACLU’s data right away (and possibly, to stop collecting all data), but also basically teed up the Second Circuit to remind the FISC it is not an appellate court.I’m pleasantly surprised by this, as I suspect it reflects a decision to accept the Second Circuit verdict in ACLU v. Clapper and to move to shut down other lawsuits.
Marcy Wheeler: EFF, remember, is the one NGO that has a preservation order, which got extended from its earlier NSA lawsuits (like Jewel) to the current dragnet suit. So when I Con the Record says it can’t destroy all the data yet, it’s talking EFF, and by extension, CAIR. So this announcement — in addition to preparing whatever they’ll file to get the Second Circuit off its back — is likely an effort to moot that lawsuit, which in my opinion poses by far the biggest threat of real fireworks about the dragnet (not least because it would easily be shown to Violate a Prior SCOTUS Decision Prohibiting the Mapping of Organizations).
NAACP v. Alabama ex. Rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958).
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1950-1959/1957/1957_91/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/357/449
Pretending to destroy the evidence.
That’s a new low even for the US government.
Considering how much of the POTS is going to move to VoIP and the Internet over the next decade, this is a total non-issue.
Let us know when the GCHQ stop collecting the USA’s Internet traffic (and the NSA the rest of the world’s,) because that’s what is important.
NSA: Very careful in repeatedly using Section-215 as an Adjective.
“Just a copy, of a copy, of a copy…”
I don’t feel too sorry for the NSA. They will pass a copy of this data to their friends at GCHQ before they destroy the records. And since they started collecting nude selfless off the internet, nobody spends too much time looking through the phone metadata records anymore. Passive collection is passé – the future is hacking using botnets. Why should they settle for your call metadata when they can hack your entire contacts list?
So this really marks a step forward, if only the NSA can focus on the bright promise of the data collection possibilities which lie ahead.
I see my computer ‘corrected’ selfies to selfless. So I’ve just punished it by turning off ‘correct spelling automatically’. Dat wheel shew it whooz bos.
The question becomes, does doing so increase your opsec or decrease it? :P
You ask “why should they settle for metadata…”
Bulk data serves a very different purpose than targeted data. Say there is an American that threatens political destabilization, but their identity is not known until very late in the process. It is necessary to act quickly, to see any and all bad things they ever done, and forward the information to the various agencies that can stop him (FBI, DEA, IRS, etc). Without the bulk data, this terrible person could actually win the electoral race they are currently engaged in, and destroy everything! The NSA data in the hands of of their customers (i.e. the incumbent politician) is the only thing protecting you from this terrible fate!
Lyung f*ers, they’ll destroy the metadata but not the superset they produced from it and the 12 other sources you wouldnt imagine they tap into. I’m seriously dissapointed in a populace who presumably read 1984 and yet allow this monstrosity to exist.
Well, that was 1984. That was fiction. This is 2015. So we made sure that didn’t happen.
…because all our metadata will still be cumulatively residing elsewhere. It will be on backup media governed by a variety of record retention and destruction schedules in any or all of the other 16 US intelligence agencies, every foreign intelligence service lap dog or private corporate server that the DOJ won’t investigate or pursue.
I agree with Abdo. What reason is there to believe any of this? They lied about taking the information to begin with.