President Barack Obama reportedly is going to propose to Congress that the National Security Agency’s most controversial practice be put to an end. Obama will ask Congress to approve ending the agency’s bulk data collection of phone records.
Senior officials told The New York Times that the proposal will allow phone carriers to keep data of their customers and would require the NSA to get a court order in order to have access to the bulk records. The phone companies will not be required to keep the data any longer than their standard practices.
Today’s news follows a January speech in which the president first said that he no longer wants the government to have complete access to phone records, also known as “metadata.” He sent the Justice Department on a mission to propose the best way of handling this and their plan is due on Friday.
According to The Times, the new plan will require a different kind of surveillance court order than previously needed to give agencies access to the data. It would also clarify Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which had allowed the data collection, notes Reuters.
The NSA’s mass collection of data was exposed when Edward Snowden leaked documents last year to the U.K. Guardian and Washington Post. Since then, several more programs have been exposed through the documents he took and published in papers around the world. In the U.S., the NSA was widely criticized for collecting all that data.
“We have many questions about the details, but we agree with the administration that the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of call records should end,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union told The Times. “As we’ve argued since the program was disclosed, the government can track suspected terrorists without placing millions of people under permanent surveillance.”