NSA Spying Partially Disabled by USA Freedom Act

Privacy advocates are celebrating this week after a massive, 14-year-old program that regularly combed through civilian phone records was forcibly shut down by the Obama Administration.

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) ended its U.S. phone surveillance that began following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is how it worked: In an effort to sniff out suspicious activity, the government would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), for an order requiring telecommunication companies to hand over information on nearly all customers, such as phone numbers and duration of calls, but not the content of them—what those in the business call “metadata.”

This isn’t brand new news. You might remember that back in 2013 North Carolinian Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency subcontractor, blew the whistle on the practice when he leaked an official order from the FISC compelling Verizon to hand over call records. In addition, Snowden documents revealed the NSA’s efforts to secretly crack cellphone encryption and read texts, its furtive observation of numerous world leaders and foreign governments and the existence of PRISM, a program whereby the NSA demanded lawful access to servers of U.S. tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Of course there was public outrage but the wheels turn slow in Washington. Despite Snowden’s vast and damning evidence that the NSA was, in fact, spying on millions of Americans and others, the agency continued to collect the aforementioned data. Finally in June of this year, a law was passed, the USA Freedom Act, which greatly reduced U.S. espionage. The new system now requires counter-terrorism units to get a court order to ask telecom operators to monitor call records for a specific person or group for up to six months.

The metadata collected by the NSA over the past five years will supposedly be preserved for “data integrity purposes” through February 29. After that the NSA will be required to purge all of those records once pending litigation is resolved.

Unfortunately, the other parts of the NSA’s invasive programs still exist. PRISM, for example, is still very active, primarily because the NSA says that program focuses on foreign intelligence gathering, not surveillance of Americans. Yet the NSA continues to collect private electronic data belonging to users of major Internet services such as Gmail and Facebook.

Nevertheless, the shutdown shows that for the first time the NSA is losing surveillance powers. Engadget says “this moment is a vindication of sorts for Edward Snowden, whose whistleblowing revealed the NSA’s true reach and prompted the (Freedom) Act’s existence. Whatever you think of Snowden’s actions, there’s no question that he’s ultimately responsible for these policy changes.”

Snowden is currently living in Russia, with the U.S. pursuing his extradition.

In the wake of the Paris attacks in which 130 died, some Republican lawmakers want to preserve metadata bulk collection until 2017. This, despite a presidential review, which, according to Reuters, concluded the surveillance regime did not lead to a single clear terrorism breakthrough.

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