NSA Triples Collection of U.S. Phone Records

According to Reuters (May 7, 2018) the National Security Agency (NSA) collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans last year, more than triple gathered in 2016. The records collected by the NSA include the numbers and time of a call or text message, but not their content. U.S. intelligence officials have said the number of records collected would include multiple calls made to or from the same phone numbers and involved a level of duplication when obtaining the same record of a call from two different companies.

The report also showed a rise in the number of foreigners living outside the United States who were targeted under a warrantless internet surveillance program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that Congress renewed earlier this year. That figure increased to 129,080 in 2017 from 106,469 in 2016, the report said, and is up from 89,138 targets in 2013, or a cumulative rise over five years of about 45 percent.