Phone Data Collection by United States Reauthorized
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reauthorized the federal government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata last month, according to a declassified order made public by the director of National Intelligence on Monday.
The order, signed on Dec. 4 by FISC Judge Raymond Dearie, found “reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to authorized investigations (other than threat assessments) being conducted by the FBI to protect against international terrorism.”
Under the heavily redacted primary order, which expires on Feb. 27, the National Security Administration will receive daily productions of all call-detail records - known as telephony metadata - for communications both between the United States and abroad, and local telephone calls made in the United States.
While the order tasks the National Security Agency with storing the data, the government must request “by motion and on a case-by-case basis” permission from the court to use the data - satisfying the reasonable articulable suspicion standard “as ‘seeds’ to query the metadata to obtain contact chaining information, within two hops of an approved ‘seed,’ for purposes of obtaining foreign intelligence information,” Dearie wrote.
More: Courthouse News Service