New York Times

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.