Surprise! The NSA Is Still Spying On You
At midnight on Saturday, the National Security Agency ended one of its most notorious spying programs. This is only a tiny victory. The NSA’s sprawling, inefficient surveillance apparatus is still a privacy threat.
The bulk phone records collection program was banned in the USA Freedom Act, a law that curbed some domestic spying. This program allowed the NSA to collect metadata from American citizens’ calls en masse. Now, instead of collecting phone metadata in an expansive dragnet, the USA Freedom Act requires the NSA to first make a “specific query,” like a name, or a device number.
The USA Freedom Act didn’t make sweeping reforms. It nipped one program and left most others intact. The NSA stopped this particular program at the last possible moment because it would’ve broken the law by keeping it running a second longer—and it stopped knowing that it had plenty of other options for warrantless spying.
