President Obama must finally end NSA phone record collection, says privacy board

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is calling out President Barack Obama for continuing to collect Americans’ phone data in bulk, a year after it urged an end to the controversial National Security Agency program.

The Obama Administration could cease the mass acquisition of US phone records “at any time”, the Board said. PCLOB Chairman David Medine said that the Administration was acting in “good faith” and had agreed in principle to most of the 22 reform recommendations the board had offered in its two 2014 reports into bulk NSA surveillance. The board’s report found that the Administration had in many cases not implemented recommendations it agreed to in principle, such as assessing whether the NSA is successfully filtering out purely domestic communications when it siphons data directly from the “backbone” of the Internet.