NSA claims to meet privacy safeguards

The National Security Agency is adequately protecting Americans’ civil liberties and privacy as it shifts to a new intelligence collection program, it claimed in a transparency report. Two months after the NSA abandoned its controversial collection of phone records, the spy agency claimed to have satisfied eight separate principles to protect people’s privacy.

“The government has strengthened privacy safeguards by, among other things, ending the collection of telephone metadata in bulk,” the agency claimed, “and having telecommunications providers, pursuant to court orders, hold and query the data.” Phone metadata are records about which two numbers are involved in a call, when it occurred and how long the call lasted. The records do not contain information about what was discussed in the conversation. Under the former system, the NSA collected phone records from millions of Americans and then combed through them to search for individual numbers it believed were connected to a terrorist or foreign government.