The National Security Agency faced pressure Tuesday to officially pull the plug on its system for analyzing domestic telephone records in light of reports of the program being quietly abandoned.
Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, urged the Trump administration to formally discontinue the NSA program after a senior Republican congressional aide claimed it was shelved several months earlier.
“I cannot comment on classified matters referenced in media reports,” said Mr. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “However, it is increasingly clear to me that the NSA’s implementation of reforms to the phone records dragnet has been fundamentally flawed. In my view, the administration must permanently end the phone records program and Congress should refuse to reauthorize it later this year.”
Luke Murry, a national security adviser to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, said during a recent interview about the program that the NSA “hasn’t actually been using it for the past six months.”
“I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up,” Mr. Murry said a taping of the “Lawfare” podcast, The New York Times first reported Tuesday.
Launched secretly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, the system allowed the agency to warrantlessly collect in bulk the phone and text records, or metadata, of communications handled by U.S. telecommunications companies, in order to be analyzed to identify potential links to known terrorism suspects. It was replaced by a revised system codified by the USA Freedom Act passed in 2015, and that program will expire at the end of the year unless renewed by Congress.
Despite the reforms, the system still collected more than 543 million phone records in 2017, the agency’s internal watchdog acknowledged last year.
NSA is considering discontinuing the program “because it lacks operational value,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
“The agency’s admission last year that it vacuumed up over half a billion telephone records indicates that, despite the intent of Congress, bulk collection of phone records never really ended,” Mr. Wyden said in a statement. “Last year, I called for a thorough investigation of the program. Today, the NSA owes the American people an explanation of where things stand. I will not stop pushing Congress and intelligence leaders to be straight with the American people and end unnecessary surveillance that violates our constitutional freedoms without keeping us any safer.”
The NSA declined to comment.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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