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NSA Wants To Dump the Phone Records It Gathered Over 14 Years (thenextweb.com)
According to The Next Web, the NSA would like to get rid of something that a lot of people wish they'd never had in the first place: phone records that the agency has collected over a
decade
and
a
half (more, really)
of
mass
surveillance.
However, the EFF wants to make sure that the evidence of snooping doesn't get buried along with the actual recorded data. From the article: [T]he government says that it can't be sued by bodies like the EFF. The organization is currently involved in two pending cases seeking a remedy for the past 14 years of illegal phone record collection.
EFF wrote a letter (PDF) to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court last December which it has now made public, explaining that it is ready to discuss options that will allow destruction of the records in ways that still preserve its ability to prosecute the cases.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out: if the government doesn't agree to a discussion about how to handle these phone records, it's possible that they will remain on file for years to come. Plus, it could allow the NSA to avoid being held accountable for its illegal mass surveillance.
Nobody with a shred of common sense would actually believe that the government would actually erase all of this data. There will absolutely be copies of it on a secure, secret server somewhere in Spookland. This is nothing but a diversionary tactic.