New Bill Would Stop NSA’s Mass Collection of U.S. Phone Data

In particular, the bill would kill off what’s called the Call Detail Records program under an effort to restrict the domestic phone-data dragnet in the wake of Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. That apparent shutdown prompted speculation in surveillance-policy circles that the NSA might have either migrated its domestic phone-data dragnets under authorities outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – something the NSA has repeatedly done with its post-9/11 warrantless surveillance efforts – or shut down the collection out of an assessment that analyzing call patterns at scale is an outmoded form of counterterrorism surveillance. But the Call Detail Records program created by the USA FREEDOM Act – one that outsourced much of the surveillance activity to telecommunications companies in a cumbersome way – never had substantial support, even before the revelations of the overcollection and subsequent purge and shutdown.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com