Rep Schiff: Phone providers should retain metadata on phone calls, not NSA

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) encouraged the intelligence community to restructure a National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program that gathers metadata on the phone records of Verizon and other phone providers' customers. Rep Schiff argued that Americans may feel "much more comfortable" if telecommunications companies retained the metadata on customers' phone calls rather funneling it to the secretive spy agency. This way, the NSA would have to go to the telecommunications companies to query phone records of interest. "What are the prospects for changing the program such that rather than the government acquiring the vast amounts of metadata, the telecommunications companies retain the metadata and then only on those 300 or so occasions where it needs to be queried, you're querying the telecommunications providers for whether they have those business records related to a reasonable articulable suspicion of foreign terrorist connection?" Rep Schiff asked NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on the agency's surveillance programs.

"If you leave it at the service providers, you have a separate set of issues in terms of how you actually get the information, then how you have to go back and get that information, and how you follow it on and the legal authority … to compel them to keep these records for a certain period of time," Alexander said. "The concern is speed in crisis. How do we do this? And so that's what we need to bring back to you, and then I think have this discussion here and let people know where we are on it," he added.