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."

Comments

Bullshit....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe them

What court?

[Checkered Daemon]

So what kind of a 'court order' are we talking about here? An honest to God subpoena issued by a real court and a real judge and all the Constitutional protections provided by such? Or a secret FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) finding issued by a bunch of kangaroos with a rubber stamp?

Re:What court?

[Checkered Daemon]

Thanks! But I've been around a while (check my number). I've had what I considered very important comments ignored, and had stupid wise-cracks modded way up. I tend to limit my comments to things I know a lot about. But this is the first time I've ever been called a troll. Makes me feel like a true member of the Slashdot community. };->

which is how it was, billing data & subpoena

[raymorris]

Which is going back to how it used it used to be. The phone company had records of who called who for billing purposes. The government could subpoena that information, with a court order.

Recently, when the government had all the information, that actually skipped the subpoena part - they already HAD the data, so they didn't need a court order to get it.

Now the thing is to watch that they don't get 10,000 subpoenas per day, each covering a million people, from a secret court.

and i should believe this... why again?

[Anonymous Coward]

During the whole Snowden event, it was astonishing that at every single step, the NSA was caught lying to the American public.

NSA: "We're not collecting anything about Americans."
Snowden: Bullshit, and here's proof.
NSA: "Well, we're only going after terrorists."
Snowden: Bullshit, and here's proof.
NSA: "Well, we're just collecting metadata."
Snowden: Bullshit, and here's proof.

etc. On and on it went. Those folks are sociopaths!

There is ZERO credibility left. Absolutely none. In fact, that's probably not strong enough: they have actual negative credibility. Not just is any random thing they say as likely to be a lie as not, it's much more likely to be a lie than not.

Finding the needle

[GrahamCox]

When looking for a needle in a haystack, you don't add more hay. This is good news (if even remotely true). I hope the governments of Australia and especially the UK take note. They are obsessed with adding as much hay as they can get away with.

Bulk surveillance, what is it good for?

[whoever57]

Let's see:
Paris: all attackers known in advance. Warnings provided to French government. Not using encrypted communications.
Boston: Specific warnings provided to US authorities. Probably not using encrypted communications (the NSA and others would have made this claim, so by default, we can assume the opposite)
9/11. Most, if not all attackers already known to FBI/CIA. Again, we can assume that no encrypted communications were involved.

In other words, the bulk surveillance has no value in preventing terrorist attacks. If so, what is it for? Blackmailing politicians? Blackmailing the wealthy and powerful?

The NSA/FBI/CIA: price for failure: more resources. More power. More everything. One could almost imagine that there is a strong incentive in letting a small number of terror attacks take place.