NSA Can Access More Phone Data Than Ever
NSA Can Access More Phone Data Than Ever
By LEE FERRAN Oct
20, 2016, 10:16 AM ET
One of the reforms designed to rein in the surveillance
authorities of the National Security Agency has perhaps inadvertently solved a
technical problem for the spy outfit and granted it potential access to much
more data than before, a former top official told ABC News.
Before the signing of the USA Freedom Act in June 2015,
one of the NSA's most controversial programs was the mass collection of
telephonic metadata from millions of Americans — the information about calls,
including the telephone numbers involved, the time and the duration but not the
calls' content — under a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act's Section 215.
From this large "haystack," as officials have called it, NSA analysts
could get approval to run queries on specific numbers purportedly linked to
international terrorism investigations.
The problem for the NSA was that the haystack was only
about 30 percent as big as it should've been; the NSA database was missing a
lot of data. As The Washington Post reported in 2014, the agency was not
getting information from all wireless carriers and it also couldn't handle the
deluge of data that was coming in.
On the technical side, Chris Inglis, who served as the
NSA's deputy director until January 2014, recently told ABC News that when
major telecommunications companies previously handed over customer records, the
NSA "just didn't ingest all of it."
"[NSA officials] were trying to make sure they were
doing it exactly right," he said, meaning making sure that the data was
being pulled in according to existing privacy policies. The metadata also came
in various forms from the different companies, so the NSA had to reformat much
of it before loading it into a searchable database.
Both hurdles meant that the NSA couldn't keep up, and of
all the metadata the agency wanted to be available for specific searches
internally, only about a third of it actually was.
But then the USA Freedom Act was signed into law, and now
Inglis said, all that is "somebody else's problem."
The USA Freedom Act ended the NSA's bulk collection of
metadata but charged the telecommunications companies with keeping the data on
hand. The NSA and other U.S. government agencies now must request information
about specific phone numbers or other identifying elements from the
telecommunications companies after going through the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) court and arguing that there is a "reasonable,
articulable suspicion" that the number is associated with international
terrorism.
As a result, the NSA no longer has to worry about keeping
up its own database and, according to Inglis, the percentage of available
records has shot up from 30 percent to virtually 100. Rather than one internal,
incomplete database, the NSA can now query any of several complete ones.
The new system "guarantees that the NSA can have
access to all of it," Inglis said.
NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell made a brief reference
to the increased capacity in a post for the Lawfare blog in January after
terrorist attacks at home and abroad.
"Largely overlooked in the debate that has ensued in
the wake of recent attacks is the fact that under the new arrangement, our
national security professionals will have access to a greater volume of call
records subject to query in a way that is consistent with our regard for civil
liberties," he wrote.
Mark Rumold, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, told ABC News he doesn't have much of a problem with the
NSA's wider access to telephone data, since now the agency has to go through a
"legitimate" system with "procedural protections" before
jumping into the databases.
"Their ability to obtain records has broadened, but
by all accounts, they're collecting a far narrower pool of data than they were
initially," he said, referring to returns on specific searches. "They
can use a type of legal process with a broader spectrum of providers than
earlier. To me, that isn't like a strike against it. That's almost something in
favor of it, because we've gone through this public process, we've had this
debate, and this is where we settled on the scope of the authority we were
going to give them."
Rumold said he's still concerned about the NSA's ability
to get information on phone numbers linked to a number in question — up to two
"hops" away — but he said the USA Freedom Act "remains a step in
the right direction."
The trade-off of the new system, according to Inglis, is
in the efficiency of the searches. Whereas in the past the NSA could
instantaneously run approved searches of its database, now the agency must
approach each telecommunications company to ask about a number and then wait
for a response.
In his January post Gerstell acknowledged concerns that
the new approach could be "too cumbersome to be effective" and said
the NSA will report to Congress on how the arrangement is working. A
representative for the NSA declined to tell ABC News if any problems have been
encountered so far, and Rumold noted there has been no public evidence of any
issues.
Inglis said he isn't terribly concerned if the searches
are a little slower. It's a small price to pay, he said, for what he called an
"additional safeguard" that could increase the public's confidence in
what the NSA is and how it operates.
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