NSA’s deletion of call records raises questions

Agency releases statement justifying move, citing ‘technical irregularities’ in data

The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the programme.

The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance.

The agency released a statement late on Thursday saying that it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers”. That points to a failure of the programme, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department.

“They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time — which they are now purging — was not reliable and was infected with some kind of technical error,” said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle.

Christopher Augustine, an NSA spokesperson, disagreed with the claim that the programme had failed. “This is a case in which NSA determined that there was a problem and proactively took all the right steps to fix it,” he said.