NSA collected 151 million phone records in 2016, despite surveillance law changes
In 2016, the National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records about Americans’ phone calls, despite Congress passing a law the previous year — the USA Freedom Act — intended to curb bulk surveillance. These records are comprised of metadata about calls (which includes time, duration, and the numbers of both recipient and caller) and their collection was revealed in an annual transparency report, published on Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The report is the first assessment the public has seen of the impact of the USA Freedom Act, and shows the difficulty the NSA has reining in surveillance while continuing to collect useful intelligence. This Freedom Act was passed in 2015 after the…
