NSA set to purge millions of calling records

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's administration has decided that the National Security Agency soon will stop examining -- and ultimately destroy -- millions of U.S. calling records it collected under a program publicly revealed by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

When Congress passed a law in June ending the agency's bulk collection of U.S. calling records after a six-month transition, officials said they weren't sure whether they would continue to make use of the records that had already been collected, which generally go back five years. Typically, intelligence agencies are extremely reluctant to part with data they consider lawfully obtained. The program began shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, but most of the records are purged every five years.

The National Security Agency's collection of U.S. phone data has been contentious ever since Snowden disclosed it to journalists in 2013. Obama sought, and Congress passed, a law ending the collection and instead allowing the agency to request the records from phone companies as needed in terrorism investigations.

That still left the question of what to do about the records already in the database. On Monday, the director of national intelligence said in a statement those records would no longer be examined in terrorism investigations after Nov. 29 and would be destroyed as soon as possible.

The records can't be purged at the moment because the National Security Agency is being sued over them, the statement said.

The agency queried the database about 300 times each year against phone numbers suspected of being linked to terrorism. But the program was not considered instrumental in detecting terror plots.

It later emerged that some officials inside the agency wanted to unilaterally stop collecting the records, both because they were concerned about the civil liberties information and because they didn't believe the program was effective. Many mobile phone records, for example, were not collected.

In related news, Peru's government on Monday ordered telecommunications companies to grant police no-warrant access to cellphone users' locations and other call data in real time and store that data for three years.

The government published the legislative decree on a national holiday and a day before Peru's independence day celebrations, when schools, government offices and most businesses are closed. Its contents were not debated in Congress, and it was enacted under special powers that lawmakers recently granted to President Ollanta Humala's government.

The government said the measure is needed to fight organized crime in a country plagued by cocaine trafficking, extortion, murder-for-hire, illegal logging and land trafficking.

As a safeguard against abuse, the decree stipulates that police must retroactively obtain a judge's approval in order to use the data in court.

A Section on 07/28/2015

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