14 DAY TRIAL // The law may have changed, banning the NSA from collecting data on Americans' phone calls, but that doesn't mean the agency complied. In fact, a new report indicates the National Security Agency collected 151 million records on locals.
According to the report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which tries to evaluate the effects of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, the agency continued to collect vast amounts of records under the new system, despite having court orders for only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016.
The USA Freedom Act of 2015 was supposed to curtail the large liberties the NSA took when collecting data, using the Patriot Act to justify its actions. The debate regarding the Freedom Act came after Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, leaked plenty of documents detailing the ways the government agency was spying on people, both foreigners and Americans. The new Freedom Act demanded that the NSA get a court order on a case-by-case basis to obtain the right to the call data of their suspects from telephone companies.
Up and up
It seems, however, given the numbers, that the NSA collected a lot more than it was supposed to, given how it only had a handful of court orders and 151 million call records.
The agency claims the large number can be attributed in part to duplication, as a single call would be counted as two records because they were submitted separately by the two companies handling the call. Still, the number continues to be entirely too large.
The report comes days after the NSA said it stopped the warrantless collection of American's emails and texts, even if they mentioned a foreign intelligence target in their messages.
The Congress is getting ready to decide whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, which sits at the base of the warrantless surveillance program, will be reauthorized or not.