SurveillanceCivil liberties organizations urge transparency on NSA domestic phone record surveillance

Last week, twenty-four civil liberties organizations sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, urging him to report—as required by law—statistics that could help clear up just how many individuals are subject to broad NSA surveillance of domestic telephone records.

These records show who is calling whom and when, but not the content of the calls.

David Ruiz writes on the EFF website that these numbers are important to understanding how the NSA conducts this sensitive surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, as amended by the USA Freedom Act of 2015. Under the earlier version of this surveillance program, the NSA collected details of nearly every single Americans’ phone calls. “With the NSA’s domestic phone record surveillance powers scheduled to expire in 2019, Congress and the public deserve to know the truth before any legislative attempts to reauthorize the program,” Ruiz writes.

EFF notes that in its past three annual transparency reports, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has failed to report these statistics.

The civil liberties groups also sent a letter to Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) and Jerry Nadler (D-New York), the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, respectively, warning about the NSA’s continued failure to comply with the law mandating disclosure of this data.

Ruiz writes:

For more than a decade, the NSA relied on a faulty interpretation of Section 215 to collect the time, duration, and numbers called for nearly every single Americans’ phone calls. But a federal appeals court in New York in 2015 ruled that this collection was illegal, calling it “unprecedented and unwarranted.”

Soon after, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act. While it did not go far enough, the bill included several transparency provisions to prevent future surveillance abuse by the NSA. For example, the bill included the requirement that the NSA annually report the accurate number of “unique identifiers”—things like accounts, persons, or devices—that the NSA uses when conducting surveillance under Section 215.

Ruiz notes that Section 215 collection has risen dramatically since the bill’s passage. According to the most recent transparency report from the ODNI, the NSA collected more than 530 million call records in 2017, an increase of more than 300 percent from the year prior. Lacking accurate statistics on “unique identifiers,” however, these numbers are difficult to interpret.