NSA ends mass phone surveillance program under USA Freedom Act

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has shut down it's controversial phone surveillance program and is replacing it with more controlled methods. The NSA had begun the mass collection of data from civillians' phone records following the September 11 terror attacks. Telecom operators were required to regularly hand over data like numbers connected with, and the duration of calls, but not the content of the conversations.

It was 2013, though, that the program faced serious blowback, in the form of former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. One of the many documents he leaked was an official order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), requiring Verizon to hand over call records. That eventually sparked public outrage and heated debate in Congress, leading up to the formation of the USA Freedom Act. 

It was on Friday that the Obama administration said that, under the Freedom Act, the NSA would end the wide-net surveillance program by Sunday, and have a new system in place, one more precisely targetted. Counter-terrorism units have to now get a court order to ask telecom operators to monitor call records, and only for specific people or groups, for a maximum term of six months. For now, the data already collected will be preserved on file until February 29 2016, after which it will be destroyed and erased.

However, it's worth noting that despite the victory for anti-surveillance groups, it's not a complete one. Other parts of the NSA's invasive programmes still exist. PRISM, also leaked by Snowden, and which gathers data from internet users, is still very active, largely because the NSA has repeated over and over that the targets of that kind of surveillance are not American citizens. The outrage, therefore, is limited.