NSA Phone-Record Destruction Halt Won by Privacy Group

The National Security Agency was blocked by a judge from carrying out plans to begin destroying phone records collected for surveillance after a privacy group argued they are relevant to lawsuits claiming the practice is unconstitutional.

US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the agency to retain the records and scheduled a hearing for March 19 on whether they can be destroyed. The NSA had planned to dispose of the records following a March 7 ruling by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group based in San Francisco, asked White for a temporary restraining order, saying the records may be used as evidence in its lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance and are covered under preservation orders in those cases. NSA is prohibited from destroying “any telephone metadata or ‘call detail’ records,” White said. The surveillance court, in its ruling, barred the NSA from keeping the records for more than five years because the privacy rights of the people whose phone data was swept up in the agency’s database trump the need for the information in litigation.

[March 10]