NSA to end bulk data collection
SC rejects cellphone search warrant case
WASHINGTON, Nov 10, (RTRS): The US National Security Agency is ready to end later this month collecting Americans’ domestic call records in bulk and move to a more targeted system, meeting a legislative deadline imposed earlier this year, according to a government memo seen by Reuters.
The memo, sent on Monday from the NSA to relevant committees in the US Congress, stated that the spy agency “has successfully developed a technical architecture to support the new program” in time for it to become operational as scheduled on Nov 29.
In stating the program’s progress and the NSA’s intent to use the new system, the memo appeared to rebut claims by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican security hawk, who told Reuters last week that he anticipated the new program would never be used because it was overly cumbersome and slow.
Congress passed legislation earlier this year that brought an end to the NSA’s indiscriminate gathering of US phone metadata, a practice exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden more than two years ago.
Targeted The legislation, known as the USA Freedom Act, called for a six-month transition period after which the NSA could only access targeted data from telephone providers with judicial approval.
“While our work is not yet complete, testing of internal systems functionality at both NSA and the telecommunications providers has begun, and exchanges of test files with the providers are under way,” the NSA’s memo read.
It added that it would be ready to begin the new system on Nov. 29 and that the NSA plans to provide further updates in early 2016 about the program’s implementation in addition to “a comparison between operations under new program and those under the soonto-expire bulk collection program.”
Earlier on Monday, a US federal judge ordered the NSA to stop collecting the call records of a lawyer and his firm, a narrow and largely symbolic victory for privacy advocates that does not affect the scheduled shut down of the full program later this month.
The US Supreme Court rejected a test case on privacy in the digital age on Monday, declining to decide whether police need to obtain search warrants to examine cellphone location information held by wireless carriers.
The nine justices turned away an appeal filed by a Florida man named Quartavious Davis, who was convicted of participating in a string of 2010 robberies in the Miami area and was sentenced to 1,941 months, almost 162 years, in prison without possibility of parole.
Davis challenged his convictions in part on the grounds that police did not seek a warrant when they asked his cellphone provider, MetroPCS Communications Inc, for location information that linked him to the seven different crime scenes between August and October 2010. Among the businesses targeted by Davis and five co-defendants were a gas station, a Walgreens drug store and a Wendy’s restaurant.
Failure Davis sought Supreme Court review after the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May that the failure to obtain a warrant did not violate Davis’ right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
The information that law enforcement agencies can obtain from wireless carriers shows which local cellphone towers users connect to at the time they make calls. Police can use the data to determine if a suspect was in the vicinity of a crime scene.
The case and others like it pending in lower courts raise questions about how much companies protect the privacy rights of their customers. The big four wireless carriers, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, receive tens of thousands of requests a year from law enforcement for what is known as “cell site location information,” or CSLI.
Davis’ lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union argued that police need “probable cause,” and therefore a warrant, in order to avoid constitutionally unreasonable searches.
But, based on a provision of the federal Stored Communications Act, the government said it does not need probable cause to obtain customer records. Instead, the government said, prosecutors need only show there are “reasonable grounds” for the records and that they are “relevant and material” to an investigation.