An official Report released by U.S. Intelligence agency revealed that Spy agency NSA Collected around 534 Million Records of Phone Calls and Text Messages of U.S Citizens.
This list of data has been collected 2017 alone which is very less than billions of records collected per day by NSA’s old bulk surveillance system on 2013 which was Revealed by Edward Snowden.
During this operation, NSA collects sensitive include including numbers and time of a call or text message, but not their content.
Privacy advocates who all are concerned about potential government intrusion into the lives of U.S peoples are raising questions about this collection of call records.
According to Reuters Report, 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. Congress passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to collect such records in bulk.
These records are comprised of metadata about calls (which includes time, duration, and the numbers of both recipient and caller)
This new report an annual set of surveillance-related statistics issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not explain why the number of records increased so dramatically.
Today, ODNI Releases Annual Intelligence Community Transparency Report regarding use of national security authorities presenting statistics on how often the government uses certain national security authorities. https://t.co/kY2EEXZCOs
— IC on the Record (@icontherecord) May 4, 2018
In this case, The NSA has found that a number of factors may influence the number of records collected, Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.
U.S. intelligence officials have said the number of records collected would include multiple calls made to or from the same phone numbers and involved a level of duplication when obtaining the same record of a call from two different companies.
After the N.S.A. put the record sets obtained from the telecoms into its databases, intelligence analysts queried that data using 31,196 search terms associated with Americans last year, up from 22,360 a year earlier.
