77 127 313 389 709 | NSA deleting more than 685 million call records due to 'technical irregularities', June 1, 2018

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/1/nsa-deletes-685-million-call-records-obtained-2015/
https://archive.fo/qavQ2

The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program.

The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database.

Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is listed as a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.

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The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.”

It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive.

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That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department.

“They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time - which they are now purging - was not reliable and was infected with some kind of technical error,” said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. “So whatever insights they were hoping to get over the past three years from this program of collection … is all worthless. Because of that, they are throwing all the data away and basically starting over.” 

 

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The agency has reviewed and re-validated the intelligence reporting to make sure it was based only on call data that had been properly received from the telecommunication providers, he said.

The agency declined to assign blame, and said the “root cause of the problem has since been addressed.”

(In the head title, the phrase 'technical irregularities' is emphasized)

Privacy and civil rights advocates said the NSA announcement raised further concerns about the program.

“This is another in a series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have ballooned out of control and have repeatedly failed to meet the basic limits imposed by Congress and the FISA court,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.

Guliani was referring to a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee requests for surveillance warrants.

She said the public has a right to know more about the cause and scope of the problem, such as how many of the records were obtained in error and whether the NSA notified any individuals that their information improperly ended up in the agency’s hands.