The NSA has been ordered to destroy phone records it collected illegally, eventually:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that the "bulk collection" of phone data the NSA illegally collected under Section 215 of the Patriot act will be locked away starting November 29, 2015.
The data will effectively be out of reach from agency employees ad infinitum, effectively making it unusable in anti-terrorism or national security investigations. The only exception will be a three-month period, in which "technical personal" can check the data for the sole purpose of verifying records produced under the new USA Freedom Act.
The NSA is obligated to preserve most of the data until civil litigation involving the program has been resolved. Also reported at The Intercept and The Register.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:45AM
This article falls apart as it hinges upon one ridiculous phrase: "will effectively be out of reach from agency employees"
If I had a glass of milk, I would have shot most of it out my nose.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:22AM
Hahaha, good one. They don't expect employees to listen to these phone records anyway. They feed it to an artificial neuron network and that's not an employee. So their main use-case remains.