NSA collected Americans' phone records despite law change: report/ Reuters

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) just issued a report that said the NSA had FISA court permission to spy on less than 100 people (terrorism suspects) in 2016, but it collected information on 150 million phone calls instead.

You might ask how NSA whittled down the billions of phone calls made in the US last year to 150 million. Or you might remember that a former top NSA official, Bill Binney, told us in 2014 that NSA collects not only the metadata, but the entire conversation, of most phone calls:

At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

And then you might call the ODNI report a “limited hangout”–designed to make us think we are getting the “real truth” at last, when in fact this new “admission” barely scratches the surface of what is truly happening.

Today I was sent a short guide on achieving internet privacy, designed for journalists. I have my doubts that true privacy is possible, especially for journalists handling issues related to “national security,” but there do exist methods to make it harder for the snoops. This free guide, by Michael Dagan, may be worth a look if you need to beef up your security.

Below is from the Reuters story on the ODNI admission:

The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top U.S. intelligence officer.

The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, which limited the NSA to collecting phone records and contacts of people U.S. and allied intelligence agencies suspect may have ties to terrorism.

It found that the NSA collected the 151 million records even though it had warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, in addition to a handful identified the previous year.

The NSA has been gathering a vast quantity of telephone “metadata,” records of callers’ and recipients’ phone numbers and the times and durations of the calls – but not their content – since the September 11, 2001, attacks…