Spy agency NSA triples collection of U.S. phone records: official report
Spy agency NSA triples collection of U.S. phone records:
official report
Dustin Volz MAY 4, 2018 / 12:56 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency
collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans
last year, more than triple gathered in 2016, a U.S. intelligence agency report
released on Friday said.
The sharp increase from 151 million occurred during the
second full year of a new surveillance system established at the spy agency
after U.S. lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to
collect such records in bulk.
The spike in collection of call records coincided with an
increase reported on Friday across other surveillance methods, raising
questions from some privacy advocates who are concerned about potential
government overreach and intrusion into the lives of U.S. citizens.
The 2017 call records tally remained far less than an
estimated billions of records collected per day under the NSA’s old bulk
surveillance system, which was exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor
Edward Snowden in 2013.
The records collected by the NSA include the numbers and
time of a call or text message, but not their content.
Overall increases in surveillance hauls were both
mystifying and alarming coming years after Snowden’s leaks, privacy advocates
said.
“The intelligence community’s transparency has yet to
extend to explaining dramatic increases in their collection,” said Robyn
Greene, policy counsel at the Washington-based Open Technology Institute that
focuses on digital issues.
The government “has not altered the manner in which it
uses its authority to obtain call detail records,” Timothy Barrett, a spokesman
at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the
annual report, said in a statement.
The NSA has found that a number of factors may influence
the amount of records collected, Barrett said. These included the number of
court-approved selection terms, which could be a phone number of someone who is
potentially the subject of an investigation, or the amount of historical
information retained by phone service providers, Barrett said.
“We expect this number to fluctuate from year to year,”
he said.
U.S. intelligence officials have said the number of
records collected would include multiple calls made to or from the same phone
numbers and involved a level of duplication when obtaining the same record of a
call from two different companies.
Friday’s report also showed a rise in the number of
foreigners living outside the United States who were targeted under a
warrantless internet surveillance program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, that Congress renewed earlier this year.
That figure increased to 129,080 in 2017 from 106,469 in
2016, the report said, and is up from 89,138 targets in 2013, or a cumulative
rise over five years of about 45 percent.
U.S. intelligence agencies consider Section 702 a vital
tool to protect national security but privacy advocates say the program
incidentally collects an unknown number of communications belonging to
Americans.
Reporting by Dustin Volz; editing by Grant McCool
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