Yesterday marked the end of the National Security Agency (NSA)’s bulk telephone-metadata collection program, in which it demanded terabytes of information about phone calls from telecom giants like Verizon. The Agency didn’t obtain any information within the phone calls (no recordings), just ‘metadata’ like what numbers were called when by whom and for how long.
The NSA will still have the ability to gather metadata from phone calls, but as of today it must request the data from the companies rather than harvesting it. More importantly, it must do so with a specific target (or group) named, and it will receive data about relevant calls for six months after a successful request.
The metadata that the National Security Agency has collected thus far will be maintained until the end of February 2016, at which point it will be deleted except for any that pertains to pending legislation.
Still Spying On Everything Else
The NSA still has dozens of programs that spy on many other aspects of our everyday lives, of course. The PRISM program — which the NSA itself calls its “#1 source of raw intelligence” collects similar metadata about Internet usage — is still collecting huge quantities of data from:
- Yahoo!
- Skype
- Microsoft
- YouTube
- Apple
- AOL (yes, it still exists!)
Similarly, the MUSCULAR program gives the NSA (illegal) access to the Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Clouds by tapping not into the servers themselves, but into the communications channels that connect the many servers that host each Cloud. This means they can easily look at any data you have stored on any of their respective Clouds at any time, because once the data is travelling between their own servers, it’s no longer protected on a Secure Socket Layer.
The XKEYSCORE program allows an NSA agent to access real-time Internet usage by a targeted person, including their emails (content as well as metadata), live browser activity, browser histories, voice and video chats, and more. In some cases, the data can be available to an agent up to 3 days after the actual digital events took place.
In partnership with the British equivalent of the NSA, called GCHQ, the TEMPORA project involves tapping into the undersea cables that carry the Internet from continent to continent — which the two organizations have quite handily (and illegally) done. They are currently sharing vast quantities of data ‘sniped’ from streaming communications including VoIP phone calls, video chats, and text chats.
So while the National Security Agency isn’t collecting bulk metadata about your phone calls anymore, rest assured, they still know everything about everyone…I mean, terrorists. (Thank you to Edward Snowden for calling these programs, among others, to the attention of the general public.)
