NSA has temporarily halted massive storage of metadata for telephone conversations

The American intelligence service NSA has temporarily stopped the massive storage of data about telephone calls and texts, reports business newspaper The Wall Street Journal. The spy program would have become a ‘logistics headache file’.

The spy program was paused earlier this year, but the decision on mass storage of phone data has yet to be made by the White House, WSJ writes. The NSA leadership doesn’t like the program anymore and recommends stopping it, because it yields too little usable data and because storing and searching all that data would be difficult. It mainly concerns telephone data of Americans.

In recent years, intelligence has publicly claimed that the massive storage of phone data is necessary for security, but now it seems that many people within the NSA have changed their mind. It is unknown what caused that to happen. The NSA has been storing phone calls since the years following the 2001 New York attack. After 9/11, intelligence agencies were given much more powers of wiretapping.

The decision is yet to be made this year. The phone data storage program will expire if Congress does not renew it in December. NSA and the White House declined to comment on the story. Saving other metadata already stopped at the end of 2015.