Newly Declassified Study Demonstrates Uselessness of NSA's Phone Metadata Program

The New York Times is reporting on the NSA's phone metadata program, which the NSA shut down last year: A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans' domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigatio...

Sunset of Section 215 Means All Eyes on USA FREEDOM Act

The sun may have set at midnight on Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, putting a temporary halt to the NSA’s bulk collection of phone call metadata, but privacy champions and legal experts point to May 7 as the day the lights dimmed on that facet of the government’s surveillance efforts. On that...

Court's Ruling a 'Clear Signal' About Mass Surveillance Programs, Experts Say

The ruling last week by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that the NSA’s years-long bulk collection of phone metadata is illegal is a “clear signal” that courts are moving in the direction of striking down some mass surveillance programs, experts say. The decision, issued Thursday, is among the...

Appeals Court Rules NSA Metadata Collection Not Authorized by Section 215

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act does not authorize the bulk collection of phone records by the NSA. The ruling undermines the key foundation upon which the federal government’s phone metadata surveillance program is built, Section 215 ...

Tech Companies, Privacy Advocates Call for NSA Reform

A group of technology companies, non-profits and privacy and human rights organizations have sent a letter to President Barack Obama, the director of national intelligence and a wide range of Congressional leaders, calling for an end to the bulk collection of phone metadata under Section 215 of t...

White House Releases Plan to End Section 215 Bulk Collection

The White House today unveiled a five-point plan to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone call metadata, preserving what it says is a balance between the intelligence community’s national security needs and the public’s desire to maintain its privacy. The proposal ends the...

NSA Surveillance Reform Demonstrate Need for Public Scrutiny

The Snowden leaks and the ensuing critical spotlight shone on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs have nudged many technologists, privacy hounds and politicians away from their desks and onto the front lines calling for reforms. Two nights ago, the New York Times reported that...

Study Shows 'Metadata is Highly Sensitive'

The term metadata and the implications of its collection and analysis have been one of the key points in the debate surrounding the NSA’s broad surveillance programs over the last year. Legislators, policy makers and others continue to argue about whether metadata can actually reveal anything abo...

Congressmen Call For DNI Clapper's Ouster

A group of six Congressmen have asked President Barack Obama to remove James Clapper as director of national intelligence as a result of his misstatements to Congress about the NSA’s dragnet data-collection programs. The group, led by Rep. Darrell Issa R-Calif., said that Clapper’s role as DNI “i...

Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names is Simple

One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency’s collection of phone metadata is that the information it’s collecting, such as phone numbers and length of call, can’t be tied to the callers’ names. However, some...

Stanford Metaphone Project Aims to Show Dangers of Metadata Collection

When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June, about the agency’s collection of phone metadata from Verizon, most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren’t sure what the term encompassed, and now a group of security researchers at...

Alexander: 'FISA is the Key to Connecting the Dots'

WASHINGTON–Faced with trying to accomplish its mission in an environment that suddenly has become quite hostile and inquisitive about its methods, the National Security Agency is becoming more and more public about the challenges that lie ahead and how the agency plans to address them. One of the...