NSA Triples Collection of Data From US Phone Companies

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 large and growing volume of data gathered shows that the NSA continues to collect significant amounts of information about Americans’ phone and text messages after changes made by Congress in a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act, which overhauled how the NSA can gain access to domestic telecom data.