NSA Collected 534 Million Records Of Phone Calls And Text Messages Last Year

Isn’t this just dandy?

According to this, the NSA collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages in 2017, which is three times MORE than what it collected the year prior.

The sharp increase from 151 million occurred during the second full year of a new surveillance system established at the spy agency after U.S. lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to collect such records in bulk.

The spike in collection of call records coincided with an increase reported on Friday across other surveillance methods, raising questions from some privacy advocates who are concerned about potential government overreach and intrusion into the lives of U.S. citizens.

Still no exact word on what caused the drastic increase.

“The intelligence community’s transparency has yet to extend to explaining dramatic increases in their collection,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the Washington-based Open Technology Institute that focuses on digital issues.

The government “has not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records,” Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the annual report, said in a statement.

It sounds like NSA officials are trying to pass it off as a simple fluctuation.

The NSA has found that a number of factors may influence the amount of records collected, Barrett said. These included the number of court-approved selection terms, which could be a phone number of someone who is potentially the subject of an investigation, or the amount of historical information retained by phone service providers, Barrett said.

“We expect this number to fluctuate from year to year,” he said.

Eh. We’re talking a TRIPLE increase. Is that really a simple “fluctuation”?

I’m not so sure. But there you have it. There’s the latest NSA-related news. Happy spying.

h/t Reuters