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NSA To End Bulk Phone Surveillance By Sunday (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The White House announced today that the NSA will be shutting down the program responsible for the bulk collection of phone records by the end of tomorrow. The program will be immediately replace with a new, scaled back version as enumerated by the USA Freedom Act. "Under the Freedom Act, the NSA and law enforcement agencies can no longer collect telephone calling records in bulk in an effort to sniff out suspicious activity. Such records, known as "metadata," reveal which numbers Americans are calling and what time they place those calls, but not the content of the conversations. Instead analysts must now get a court order to ask telecommunications companies ... to enable monitoring of call records of specific people or groups for up to six months."
Instead of collecting the metadata themselves, they are getting (I think they're even paying) the phone companies to do it. Problems solved.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sure, they are still collecting the information.
Yep. I'd bet that they're still doing it one way or another.
They may have found some loophole so they can deny it with a straight face or they may just be lying through their teeth, but I'd bet anything they're still at it. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years (if not decades) into building their surveillance network and ground assets...to think they'd just stop because of a court ruling is simply naive in the extreme.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...