The National Security Agency collected data in calls and text messages in the United States that it wasn’t authorized to gather, the second incident since 2015, a report said Wednesday.
The collection of the data — which included numbers and time stamps of a call or text message, but not the conversations — was revealed months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of data it had compiled in another incident in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The newspaper reviewed heavily redacted internal NSA documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving the surveillance program.
An ACLU lawyer said the documents show the program should be shut down.
“The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many, and evidence of the program’s value all but nonexistent,” said the ACLU’s Patrick Toomey.
“There is no justification for leaving this surveillance power in the NSA’s hands.”
It’s unclear how many records the NSA collected in October.
Greg Julian, the NSA’s media relations chief, wouldn’t comment specifically on the incident and referred to the previous overcollection of data that was revealed last summer.
In that event, telecommunications firms supplied information the NSA hadn’t been authorized to collect.
“While NSA lawfully sought data pertaining to a foreign power engaged in international terrorism, the provider produced inaccurate data and data beyond which NSA sought,” Julian told the newspaper.
The ACLU’s document points to a similar situation in which a telecommunications company furnished call data the NSA hadn’t sought and weren’t approved by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The company, whose name was redacted, started delivering the data on Oct. 3, 2018, until the NSA asked it to investigate the “anomaly” on Oct. 12.
The surveillance program was begun after Sept. 11, 2001, by the George W. Bush administration in an effort to monitor calls coming into the US for any connection to terrorists.