Tuesday, July 28, 2015
NSA to Destroy Phone Records, But
'Devil May Be in the Details'
Spy agency promises to delete metadata collected under USA
Patriot Act 'as soon as possible,' although lawsuits filed over surveillance
program add ironic dynamic
The NSA is taking its time fulfilling the stipulations of the
USA Freedom Act. (Photo: François Proulx/flickr/cc)
The National Security Agency (NSA) will destroy all the metadata
it swept up from U.S. citizens while operating a secretive surveillance program
first exposed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced
on Monday.
That amounts to five years of phone records, which the ODNI said
would be expunged "as soon as possible"—though it seems that will not
be before the program's official November 29 expiration date.
"These records were collected in a manner that violates the
law, the Constitution, and basic human dignity, but they are just a tiny sliver
of the surveillance records the government is illegally gathering on millions
of people." —Tiffiniy Cheng, Fight for the Future
In May, a federal appeals court ruled
that the NSA's bulk spying program was illegal. That decision paved the way for
Congress to enact some small measure of surveillance reform by passing
the USA Freedom Act and allowing the sunset
of key provisions of the USA Patriot Act—particularly Section 215, which the
NSA previously claimed gave it the right to conduct its metadata sweep.
Under the Patriot Act, the NSA was obligated to destroy all
phone records after five years, but had free rein to conduct the dragnet which
was first put into place after September 11, 2001. The USA Freedom Act requires
the NSA to end its surveillance program within six months. Investigations have shown
that the agency queried its metadata archives roughly 300 times a year to
reference phone numbers allegedly tied to terrorism, even as the operation
proved largely useless in detecting or thwarting terror plots.
As Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of the civil liberties group Fight
for the Future, told Common Dreams: "These records were collected
in a manner that violates the law, the Constitution, and basic human dignity,
but they are just a tiny sliver of the surveillance records the government is
illegally gathering on millions of people.... President [Barack] Obama should
know better where the line between free speech and unchecked powers should be
and know that he should immediately take executive action to curtail the
twisted legal reasoning that the government uses as justification."
ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo, who argued the ultimately
successful case against the dragnet in front of the Second Circuit Court of
Appeals, told The
Intercept on Monday that although the organization is "pleased that
the NSA intends to purge the call records it has collected illegally... the
devil may be in the details."
At least one of those details includes the NSA's quiet admission
that "technical personnel" will still be allowed to access the
expunged data for three months after the grace period ends in November. The
agency says that would be "solely for data integrity purposes to verify
the records produced under the new targeted production authorized by the USA
FREEDOM Act."
But in the end, the NSA's waffling may serve to strengthen the
growing call to dismantle it.
In an ironic twist, what is now preventing that metadata from
being erased are the numerous civil liberties lawsuits pending against the NSA.
That includes litigation brought by the ACLU. Even stranger, one
of those cases is a request for the NSA to halt its phone records program
before its six-month deadline.
The government "continues to claim that no one has standing
to challenge the legality [of] these programs because no one can 'prove' that
their telephone records were included," Cindy Cohn, executive director of
digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Common Dreams.
That includes high-profile cases that helped shine a light on the program,
including Jewel v. NSA and Klayman v. Obama. "This legal
position is largely why this information must be preserved. If the government
admitted that the plaintiffs in these cases had their telephone records
collected, it might be possible for the government to destroy at least some of
them."
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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