The National Security Agency appears to have done a complete about-face over the controversial electronic spying program that whistleblower Edward Snowden brought to light almost six years ago now, involving the bulk collection of metadata related to Americans’ phone calls and text messages.
The NSA once defended the program — which was secretly launched during the George W. Bush administration without court approval — as vital to US national security interests. The nation was still reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and officials later said tools like this program help the nation’s espionage professionals deal with the new realities of terrorism.
Now? The “logistical and legal burdens of keeping it outweigh its intelligence benefits,” a new Wall Street Journal report quotes unnamed officials as saying about the controversial phone surveillance.
“The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a U.S. surveillance program that collects information about Americans’ phone calls and text messages,” the Journal reports. It continues: “The latest view is rooted in a growing belief among senior intelligence officials that the spying program provides limited value to national security and has become a logistical headache.”
The report goes on to note that the messy thicket of legal and compliance issues are the reason the agency actually decided to stop relying on the program earlier this year. Its legal authority only extends through December unless Congress decides to re-up it, which is what the agency is recommending here is not needed anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:21PM (11 children)
Dropping the current phone surveillance program because it is obsolete in the new panopticon program which has even better and more complete phone signals intelligence gathering capabilities?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:37PM (5 children)
Restrictions were placed on the program in 2015 via the USA Freedom Act. (Thanks Obama!)
The NSA hasn't been using the program at all for a while now because they're not compliant with that law.
The NSA says it's time to drop its massive phone-surveillance program [engadget.com]
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @11:32PM
The restriction was something like "Don't spy on other candidates, only Trump."
We can indeed thank Obama, in a certain way. He got his successor pissed off enough to shut down the program.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 26 2019, @12:21AM
So, the publicly known program has been placed under restrictions for a while...
What about the other program(s) that haven't been disclosed, yet?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @03:03AM (2 children)
Didn't we already go over this? Even collecting the data at all is a violation of people's rights. The so-called "Freedom Act" just mandated that phone companies store the data instead, which solves nothing. Stop repeating this stupid myth.
Obama doesn't deserve thanks, because he supported going after Edward Snowden and supported all of these Constitutional violations. Now, Trump is continuing the very same awful policies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @09:14AM (1 child)
Trump doesn't have policies aside from ass kissing dictators asses. I'm not trying to be mean to Trump but reality is what it is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 26 2019, @12:43PM
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Friday April 26 2019, @01:20AM (1 child)
Misdirect, indeed. Who _really_ talks on the phone any more? (Terrorists? They call internationally to discuss their plans? I wonder if they use calling cards -- they could get a much better rate.)
The whole issue that I've been concerned with from the beginning of the everything is e-mail envelope monitoring, web/email monitoring (questionable), recording all(?) HTTPS-encrypted traffic (esp. Tor). There's no mention of these other programs getting the axe. They're ongoing, then? Fiber-tapping the Google inter-datacenter connections?
This seems like nothing is changing. Nothing was ever done, and nothing is changing. Misdirection, make everyone feel better -- this one, pointless thing is being discontinued.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 26 2019, @01:34PM
Damn, you're optimistic. When Google obviously pushes ads at me based on my incoming and outgoing e-mail content, why wouldn't the NSA wet their beak in the same data?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday April 26 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
In related news, Facebook is facing a 5-billion dollar fine because the deep-state wants a refund for not getting Hillary elected.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 26 2019, @01:54PM
Are they going to time the payment of that fine to arrive after the Wall-meister has been deposed?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @04:59PM
Why bother with phones when they just use Alexa.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:25PM
Did anyone see if they had their fingers crossed?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:29PM
That's right. In these times, legal authority is a quaint idea from the past.
*If the government does it...*
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:41PM (3 children)
Not sure if this is new. There's been a number of articles about this. I can't read the WSJ so not sure how redundant I am with that article, but..
I remember reading something a few weeks ago, which explains the problems the data collection program is facing; in summary there are both technical and legal challenges mounting making it impractical: https://www.lawfareblog.com/section-215-no-longer-worth-effort [lawfareblog.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:50PM (1 child)
Top US gov't supercomputer locations...
TITAN SUPERCOMPUTER, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
SEQUOIA SUPERCOMPUTER, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
MIRA SUPERCOMPUTER, Argonne National Laboratory
VULCAN, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Surely they aren't just being used to predict the weather.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:39PM
Certainly not. Most of those places "just" perform calculations regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
The supercomputers that the NSA use for classified work are in different locations. Fort Meade [mil-embedded.com]. Utah Data Center [wikipedia.org]. And then we can speculate about what, say, National Reconnaissance Office [nro.gov] or Department of Defense [gcn.com] intelligence and research arms are up to.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @08:51PM
Yes, and I'm sure they can stop the legal challenges by stopping this program. The technical challenges have been continued in other programs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:44PM (8 children)
Don't need a program like this anymore once you know who all the Muslims and/or terrorists are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:52PM (4 children)
The terrorists are coming from INSIDE THE COUNTRY!!!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:59PM (3 children)
Repeating the same lie doesn't make it truth
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @10:57PM
Repeated bombings suggest intersection of Muslims and terrorists on Venn diagram, but feel free to continue living in your SJW bubble little snowflake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @01:12AM
Haha someone doesn't like reality.
Hey I don't either but i'm not stupid enough to ignore it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday April 26 2019, @05:07PM
Silly me--I thought domestic terrorism was a thing. But an AC on SN says it isn't
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:52PM (2 children)
cat phonelogs | grep 'M(a|o)h*d'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @10:12PM (1 child)
Seriously?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @06:19PM
Someone needs to read a man page or something... Never used a regex in your life before?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday April 26 2019, @02:28AM
I wonder if it's because 99% of the calls now are robocalls. I have acquaintances that get those damned Chinese calls every day. Maybe the NSA should have been doing something useful like fixing the robocall problem rather than snooping on phone calls trying to prevent almost non-existent terrorism.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 26 2019, @06:53AM (2 children)
- nsa
- what
- what about that mass spying you are performing without even getting proper permission?
- it's VITAL for national security
- uh ok
and now for part II
- citizen
- what
- i don't need the mass spying anymore
- but wasn't it vital?
- yep
- and it hasn't be substituted by nothing else to perform that VITAL function?
- er, no
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday April 26 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
You had me until this point. They have the budget, and the demonstrated lack of ethical foundation. It would be foolish to
assumebelieve them when they say they have not developed similar capabilities by another means."Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 26 2019, @06:47PM
That's the checkmate in fact, either they were lying before or (most probably) they would be lying when denying a switch to a different but equally bothersome spying system.
The rabbit hole goes deeper, because the blatant erosion and misuse of personal data, other than an exercise in control of course, might also be a method to poison the well against a transparent society, which exposes most crimes and bad behavior and prevents many other crimes. Now, I am not convinced about its feasibility...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @08:22AM
With every increase in network bandwidth ("we can, let's..."), storage size for information mined from the network needs to be increased ("we must, let's..."). But bigger storage sizes ("we can, let's...") indirectly induce need for new additional bandwidth for transfers ("we must, let's..."). This vicious cycle hits not only the NSA, but every administrator keeping his logs or a pr0n collector too. The feedback continues until all formerly relevant information becomes impractical to seek in, unsustainable for store and thus completely useless.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by MsgHack on Friday April 26 2019, @01:57PM
FTFA: “logistical and legal burdens of keeping it outweigh its intelligence benefits,”
Translation: Keeping all that data is expensive and lots of work. Google and Apple are doing a better job of it anyway. We'll let them do the heavy lifting and we'll just subpoena what we need.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @02:33PM
I bet. Responding to the TSA, Congress et. al. about all the dirt they request for political blacklists must be cumbersome. Really it is just cheaper if they all just buy directly from the carriers.
Somewhere there is probably a glossy circulating titled: "Welcome to the AT&T Combined Federal Intelligence Platform!, You're new synergistic cross platform proctology tool!"
If they are dropping it, it is because they've bought something better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @05:06PM
well the experiment cost them a pretty penny.
and of course, cost pressure will most likely make the gathered "data" not-their-problem-anymore in the most cost efficient but not privacy contious way ...
well heck, recouperate some cost in running it for nothing by "discarding" the data-holders (HDDs) to a repressive 3rd world financed shell company!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26 2019, @05:37PM
now we just need to make it cost prohibitive for the vast majority of the federal government to operate and we might get America back one day.