NSA suspends metadata collection

The National Security Agency voluntarily halted collecting electronic communications metadata such as the origin and destination of emails and VoIP Internet addresses in response to concerns from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to the Washington Post.

The court, which oversees monitoring practices by U.S. spy agencies, recently got "a little bit more of an understanding" about the NSA collection process, an anonymous official told the Post. The Justice Department and NSA declined to comment to the newspaper.

The official explained that collection procedures are being reviewed with attention to "whether the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] was written in a way that allowed the information to be collected in a way that they were collecting it."

Some lawmakers said NSA's data collection suspension creates an "intelligence gap" that should be closed by tweaking the FISA, reports the Post. Others said Army Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, NSA's director and the likely first head of the new military Cyber Command, will be able to reconcile agency practices with FISC's concerns without requiring new legislation. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) confirmed that Alexander alerted intelligence committees of his investigation into the practice.

Julian Sanchez, of the Cato Institute, took a stab at what the court's issue may be, in a blog post:

"A few years back, the FISA pen register provision was amended to effectively build into the legal order for a standard pen register, which records data about calls or emails made and received, language mirroring a legal demand for subscriber records known as a 2703(d) order in the criminal context."

"Law enforcement routinely uses that combination of a 2703(d) plus a pen register to get location tracking information for cell phones. But the evidentiary standard for getting a 2703(d) order is (very) slightly higher than the standard for a pen register alone, and federal law prohibits the use of a pen register alone to gather location data. So there might be a question about whether FISA pen registers alone can be used for cell phone location tracking purposes."

For more:
- read this Washington Post article
- see this commentary from the Cato Institute

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