NSA Purges Hundreds of Millions of Call and Text Records

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. NSA realized that its database was contaminated with some files the agency had no authority to receive. The agency began destroying the records on May 23. Officials had discovered “technical irregularities” in its collection from phone companies of so-called call record details, or metadata showing who called or texted whom and when, but not what they said. Glenn Gerstell, the NSA’s general counsel, said that because of several complex technical glitches, one or more telecom providers — he declined to say which — had responded to court orders for targets’ records by sending logs to the agency that included both accurate data and also some numbers of people the targets had not been in contact with.