The NSA — not exactly a bastion of privacy — has announced that it is deleting hundreds of millions of call and text records because of
The NSA — not exactly a bastion of privacy — has announced that it is deleting hundreds of millions of call and text records because of “technical irregularities”.
The agency says that back in May this year is started to delete all of the calls records it collected since 2015. While full details of the reasons for the deletion are not given, the NSA notes that it collected data it was not authorized to collect.
It is not clear how far through the process of deleting all of the unauthoratized records the NSA is, or how long it will take to complete, but it says that it is going public with the news out of respect for “the law, accountability, integrity, and transparency”. The agency also does not go into any details about the “technical irregularities” that were detected beyond pointing out that data collection overreached its legal limitations.
A posting on the NSA website reads:
While the agency notes that the cause of the problem has been identified and addressed, the mass deletion is typical of the NSA’s all-or-nothing approach to data collection. This is not the first time data has been deleted in this way, and the purging of records makes it impossible for any sort of external investigation into wrongdoing to take place.
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