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, @02:25AM
It's digital data. There are so many copies, and backups of backups, that you can't just make it go away. There's probably even a copy in the Library of Congress.
Data: once it's out there, it's out there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:50AM
Can you supply the street addresses where each of Google's backup and backup of backups are stored?
While I would prefer to nuke them from orbit it would suffice were one of google's people to pass a magnetized seqing needle over each bit of my own personal records on each item of storage media - and in my direct presence.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:06AM
They are in "the Cloud". You should start by nuking every cloud you can find.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:37PM
Google has thirteen data centers.
A close friend once toted a pocket nuke around in his jeep, for use in discouraging the Soviets from crossing a bridge without paying its toll. mPerhaps he could set me up.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:40PM
The reason there is no bike path from Santa Cruz to San Jose is that Lockheed uses an abandoned railroad tunnel for document storage.
Only assured destruction of the mutual kind will suffice.
Offsite backup, see.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:31AM
there! and we promise we are not lying this time. we double pinky swear!
years ago, people may have actually believed a 3 letter agency when it said something. now, it does not matter if they say things that please me or cause me to be angry. no matter what, we'll never know since they are liars to the core (or is that corp?)
so, promise us anything. we will NEVER believe you ever again.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:54AM
> there! and we promise we are not lying this time. we double pinky swear!
They won't be lying this time. They will just use another still-secret program to collect it from the databases of the now illegal program. Then they can delete the original databases and still keep the data in the new databases and without violating the letter of the ruling.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:03AM
Security Enhanced Linux. James Bamford discusses the NSA's unclassified comouter security work in The Puzzle Palace.
The CIA translates foreign academic journals then distributes the translations to publishers. Not just spy stuff but astronomy for example. It also has a large library of unclassified publications that we would all do well to read. The United States Congress should read the CIA World Fact Book.
I was once beaten unconscious by two Oregon Health & Sciences University police officers. I lay in a coma for three days. When I regained consciousness while I could visualize the correct spelling of my own name when I thought about it but could not spell it correctly when I tried to write it with a pencil on paper.
Despite that I have many close friends who are police officers and sheriff's deputies. One of my very best friends is an FBI agent.
I have a special kind of hatred for Apple, in part because I am writing this post on my iPad. Despite that I still bleed in six colors. Some other clise friends work for Apple.
An agency, government, labor union, business or even a website is not the samenas the people it is composed of.
Black and white thinking is not productive.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:32AM
The courts have also ordered us to stop sharing music as well.
Think either of these will be honored?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:41AM
exactly my thoughts, kinda. the NSA is well-known for complying with the laws and the constitution, i'm sure they'll get right on complying with the order to delete all their illegally-obtained 4th amendment violations. even if they do, they're just the de-facto intel wing for the DEA anwyay, so its not like the info isn't all already backed up and waiting for the DEA to act on it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:43AM
Ordered to destroy, but they are keeping all of it until people stop suing them.
So never. going. to. happen.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:48PM
"If we could possibly be sued then we can't get rid of it. It could be evidence!"
(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.
(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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:04AM
The phone data is probably the least valuable stuff they have, and I don't believe they will (or even can, reasonably) delete the data.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:41AM
What about the email data? There appears to be far more talk about the phone data and almost none about other issues.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:03AM
"Lol."
- Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service [wikimedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:11AM
Ohhhh! Can we meme this one? please?! I don't care if only a few people ever get the joke...
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:23PM
Personally I like this General Buck Turgidson [guim.co.uk] style image of him. Personally I think Buck was more sane.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:37PM
On this front, the USA has looked like Nazi Germany for quite some time now.
The Gestapo (and even the Stasi) would drool over what the snoops are doing in "The land of the free".
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:40AM
Will they keep everyone on a watchlist who was put on there purely because of some Kevin Bacon-like chain of phone calls? If they can keep the inferences they drew from this data, purging it doesn't really accomplish anything.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:22AM
To the NSA, everyone is on the watch list.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:22PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by unzombied on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:23PM
Isn't this the definiton of "offline archive?"