Newly declassified government documents were disclosed before the Senate judiciary committee today, shedding light on the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance practices.
While the phone records of each American are put into the NSA database, the NSA has stated that it only conducted 300 searches on its phone database last year, according to NPR.
NPR further reports that the documents revealed that the NSA follows a three ‘hop’ method—they do not only look at the suspect’s phone records, but also of the records of those who the suspect contacted, of those who called those people and everyone who called this second set of individuals.
These practices mean that the NSA’s 300 searches do not mean they only perused the records of 300 people—the numbers could well reach into the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands.
But despite Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents sparking controversy over the agency’s practices, CNN reports that the NSA has prevented 54 terrorist attacks around the world, and 13 in the U.S, according to NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander. Alexander went further to say that all the data collected is needed in order to effectively identify potential terrorists, and while "[t]he assumption is that people are out there just wheeling and dealing [users' information] […]nothing could be further from the truth. [The NSA has] tremendous oversight and compliance in these programs."
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