Friday, February 28, 2020

The Feds' Bulk Collection of Our Data Records Has Been Expensive and Useless. But That Doesn't Mean It's Going to Stop.

The report analyzes the call records program implemented by the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which formalized but also restrained the National Security Agency's secret collection of Americans' communications metadata.

Prior to the USA Freedom Act, the NSA had used the PATRIOT Act to justify collecting this data with neither the knowledge nor the consent of Americans, or even of Congress.

This new report shows that the mass collection of Americans' phone records turned out not to be a particularly good tool for tracking down terrorism.

Its authors determined that the NSA wrote only 15 intelligence reports based on information from call records accessed through the law.

In January, a bipartisan pack of privacy-minded lawmakers introduced a bill that would formally end the bulk collection of Americans' records and introduce other reforms to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Court to provide some more transparency and better protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance.

Nadler and Schiff's bill would end the bulk data collection program but would extend the part of Section 215 of the Patriot Act that lets the FBI secretly collect business records it deems relevant to terrorism investigations.

So the feds will be able to easily collect your data when it's in the hands of a third party-and these days, that means most of your data.

https://reason.com/2020/02/27/the-feds-bulk-collection-of-our-data-records-has-been-expensive-and-useless-but-that-doesnt-mean-its-going-to-stop/

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