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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

NSA deletes hundreds of millions of call records over privacy violations [engadget.com]

The NSA unfortunately has a long history [engadget.com] of violating privacy rules, although this time the agency might not be entirely to blame. The NSA is deleting [nsa.gov] hundreds of millions of call and text message data records (collected since 2015) after learning of "technical irregularities" that led to receiving records it wasn't supposed to obtain under the USA Freedom Act [engadget.com]. General counsel Glenn Gerstell told the New York Times in an interview [nytimes.com] that "one or more" unnamed telecoms had responded to data requests for targets by sending logs that included not just the relevant data, but records for people who hadn't been in contact with the targets. As it was "infeasible" to comb through all the data and find just the authorized data, the NSA decided to wipe everything.

[...] The companies involved have "addressed" the cause of the problem for data going forward, the NSA said.

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