According to sources: the controversial program of interception of the NSA is curtailed

The NSA quietly covered the system, which analyzes the internal logs of calls and text messages of Americans, and stopped the program, which was the beginning of stormy arguments about the inviolability of privacy and the rule of law after the sad events of 11/09/2001.

The NSA did not use this system for several months, and the Trump administration most likely would not ask Congress to give permission to extend this program, which expires at the end of this year.
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In a rude affirmation of their executive branch, the administration of President George W. Bush launched the program as part of their intense persecution of the conspirators Al-Qaeda (a banned organization in the Russian Federation) within a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and subsequently the court secretly blessed her.

An American technical specialist and special agent, a former NSA employee, spoke about the existence of a wiretapping program in 2013, shaking the public and fostering a growing awareness of how governments and private companies collect and use personal data.

The way in which intelligence analysts gained access to the mass data of the logs of telephone calls and SMS Americans was somewhat changed, but the goal was the same: they analyze social connections to find all people suspected of terrorism.

Intelligence agencies can use the search technique on data obtained through other means, such as collecting data from foreign telephone networks (which are in the Echelon-2 system), where there are fewer legal restrictions. But these approaches do not offer the same systematic access to the contents of telephone calls within the United States.

The US Congress has stopped and replaced the program, disclosed by Snowden, with the US Freedom Act of 2015, which expires in December. Advocates of rights and freedoms are preparing for a legislative struggle against expanding or revising the program - and with what changes, if any.

Mr. Merry, who is Kevin McCarthy’s California adviser, expressed doubts about the need for this debate over the weekend. His remarks were made during a podcast for Lawfare, the national security website.

Mr Merry raised the question of the expiration of the Freedom Act, but then reported that the Trump administration "had not actually used it for the past six months."

“In fact, I’m not sure that the administration will want to start this,” said Mr. Merry.
He referred to the problems that the NSA revealed last year. "Technical violations" polluted the agency’s database with messages that he had no right to collect, so officials deleted hundreds of millions of phone call log records and text messages received from American telecommunications firms.

Since “the sky did not fall” without a program, he said, the intelligence community must justify the need for its revival - if, indeed, the NSA believes that it is worth the effort to keep trying to make it work,
The telephone log analysis program never prevented a terrorist attack, and this fact arose during the debates after Snowden.

The NSA used records with detailed information about calls - this is metadata that shows who and when they called, but not the content of what was said - as a social network map, analyzing the connections between people to identify people suspected of terrorism.

The phone call analysis system goes back to the effects of the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration created the secret tracking program Stellarwind. One of the components was associated with a massive collection of logs of internal telephone calls of Americans.

Companies such as AT & T and MCI, which later became part of Verizon, first donated records to their customers in response to President Bush’s order. Beginning in 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Court began issuing secret orders requiring the participation of companies based on a new interpretation of article 215 of the Patriotic Act, in which, as the FBI stated, it may receive records “relevant” to the investigation of terrorism.

In June 2013, the program became known after The Guardian published the first of a number of secret files provided by Snowden, a top-secret court verdict supervising Verizon to provide records of its customers' calls.

The disclosure, one of the most significant for Snowden, caused a sharp criticism of the state theory about why it was legal: in fact, all telephone records were relevant, because the investigating authorities had to find all the needles in a haystack. The Court of Appeal later rejected this theory.

The incoming Obama administration has adopted a plan to put an end to the massive collection of internal telephone data to the NSA, but to preserve the analytical capabilities of the old program, which led to the adoption of the 2015 Patriotic Act.

According to this law, the bulk of the records remained in the hands of telephone companies, not the government. But with the permission of the judge, the agency could quickly receive telephone call logs and text messages for specific suspects, as well as all the people who were in contact with these suspects, even when they were clients of different telephone companies.

When replacing the system, the number of Americans ’communications records that the agency collected was significantly reduced from the billions per day it previously received.

Nevertheless, the scale of the collection remained enormous: in 2016, the program collected 151 million records, despite receiving court orders about using the system on only 42 suspects of terrorism in 2016, as well as a few remaining from the end of 2015. In 2017, she received orders for 40 goals and collected 534 million records.

The agency had neither the authority to collect their information, nor the practical way to view its large database and select those records that it should not have collected. As a result, the NSA decided to clean them all and start all over again.

Original publication.

Whenever I see that the Patriot Act or the Act of Freedom is associated with a program that emanates from Washington, especially Republicans, I know two things. Number two, it will be a complete failure, and number one, it will be a complete failure and illegal. TheOldPatroon (Pittsfield, MA).

If the NSA has not used this system for the past six months or so, you should only assume that a newer system has been installed that allows the government to intercept all calls, text messages, video and audio from everyone in the country.
It makes me wonder if they have an AI from the Person of Interest series, where a self-aware computer system controls everything and collects everything. And if not, you know that it is only a matter of time before they do. They have the technology to do it on an individual basis right now. The ability to access every device that works via WiFi in the house of people is very simple for a fairly large number of people, and I doubt that it would be so difficult to design and program a system to do so on a massive scale. David Parchert (East Tawas, Michigan)

I wonder how they are going to use their great new brilliant data storage for $ 1.2 billion in Utah? Joe B. (Center City)

How exactly can the public believe that the NSA will not continue to collect and use information when it did it long before it was disclosed by Snowdon? George Spencer