NSA collected 151 million records of Americans' calls, allowed 1,934 to be 'unmasked'
Despite the USA Freedom Act of 2015, the NSA collected 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls last year, even though it had obtained warrants from the FISA court to spy on only 42 people suspected of having ties to terrorism. The NSA also complied with requests from government officials to reveal the identities of 1,934 U.S. persons ensnared in the foreign surveillance.
The annual report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the first assessment of the effectiveness of the 2015 USA Freedom Act which was meant to limit dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records. In 2016, 151,230,968 was the total estimated number of Americans’ call details records, meaning metadata about calls such as the number of the caller and recipient as well as the duration and time of the call, which the NSA received from providers and then stored in NSA repositories.
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