Disputed N.S.A. Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html

…Problems with the system emerged last year, when the National Security Agency said it had decided to delete its entire database of records gathered since the Freedom Act system became operational. Glenn S. Gerstell, the agency’s general counsel, said in an interview at the time that because of complex technical glitches, one or more telecom providers — he declined to say which — had responded to court orders for records by sending logs to the agency that included both accurate and inaccurate data.

When the agency then fed those numbers back to the telecoms to get the communications logs of all of the people who had been in contact with its targets, it ended up gathering some data of people unconnected to the targets. The agency had no authority to collect their information, nor a practical way to go through its large database and cull those records it should not have gathered. As a result, it decided to purge them all and start over.

But it had not been clear until Mr. Murry’s comments in the podcast that was posted over the weekend that the problems have continued, even as a legislative battle over the Freedom Act — and the inevitable scrutiny of how the program has functioned — has drawn near….