Curtailing the spying - one small step for mankind

Obama Will Push for End to NSA's Bulk Data Collection (Click here to read more)

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Four months after the White House's review panel suggested similar changes, President Obama is finally ready to abandon the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. According to the White House's proposal, the records would stay with the phone companies for just 18 months; in order to access the data, the NSA would need to convince a judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the information was pertinent to a specific investigation. As it the law is now, the NSA collects the records in bulk from the companies and stores them for five years.

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From the New York Times:

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The N.S.A. now retains the phone data for five years. But the administration considered and rejected imposing a mandate on phone companies that they hold on to their customers' calling records for a period longer than the 18 months that federal regulations already generally require - a burden that the companies had resisted shouldering and that was seen as a major obstacle to keeping the data in their hands. A senior administration official said that intelligence agencies had concluded that the operational impact of that change would be small because older data is less important.