Charlie Savage

The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency. The letter offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications.

The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering FBI national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway. In a letter to Congress, the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act.

The National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans’ domestic calls and texts, according to a senior Republican congressional aide, halting a program that has touched off disputes about privacy and the rule of law since the Sept. 11 attacks. The agency has not used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not ask Congress to renew its legal authority, which is set to expire at the end of the year, according to the aide, Luke Murry, the House minority leader’s national security adviser.

President Donald Trump said he intended to nominate William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during the first Bush administration from 1991 to 1993, to return as head of the Justice Department. A graduate of George Washington University’s law school, Barr, 68, got his start in the 1970s working for the CIA and later worked in the Reagan White House before leaving for private practice. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him to lead the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, and later elevated him to deputy attorney general and then attorney general.

The National Security Agency has purged hundreds of millions of records logging phone calls and texts that it had gathered from American telecommunications companies since 2015.

Former FBI director James B. Comey was “insubordinate” in his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, a critical Justice Department report concluded on June 14.  But the report, by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, does not challenge the decision not to prosecute Clinton. Nor does it conclude that political bias at the FBI influenced that decision, the officials said. “We found no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations,” the report said.

The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon in 2017 — more than three times what it collected in 2016. Intelligence analysts are also more frequently searching for information about Americans within the agency’s expanding collection of so-called call detail records — telecom metadata logging who contacted whom and when, but not the contents of what they said.

The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Donald Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.

The House of Representatives voted to extend the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with minimal changes, rejecting a yearslong effort by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant new privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails and other personal communications.  The vote, 256 to 164, centered on an expiring law that permits the government, without a warrant, to collect communications of foreigners abroad from United States firms like Google and AT&T — even when those targets are talking to Americans.