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NSA To End Bulk Phone Surveillance By Sunday (reuters.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the spying-on-you-in-a-kinder-gentler-way dept.

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."

3 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Bullshit.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't believe them

  2. and i should believe this... why again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Bulk surveillance, what is it good for? by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!