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: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:53PM
Oh, I'm sure the NSA will destroy the phone records — after secretly copying them to a new, top secret location. Oh, and they will of course not destroy the copy. They weren't ordered to do so, were they? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.