How the NSA would get phone data under Obama Administration’s new plan

Under the Administration’s proposed program, the National Security Agency would still have the ability to request data without a new court order in an emergency, and “[telecommunications] companies would be compelled by court order to provide technical assistance to ensure that the records can be queried and that results are transmitted to the government in a usable format and in a timely manner.” In order to be able to live up to that mandate and deliver datasets for all numbers that are two “hops” from a specified phone number in a “timely manner,” one of two things would have to happen: telecom companies would have to have the capability to perform the same sort of analytic searches that the NSA currently performs with its Mainway database onsite; or the NSA would have to be able to make its own index of telco databases that would allow it to perform such searches. And while in either scenario the data available to the NSA would be a much smaller amount than what the agency currently retains (5 years’ worth), it would still give the NSA the ability to request large swaths of phone record data.