NSA requests significantly more calling data from American providers

The NSA requested significantly more calling and messaging data from providers in the past year than the year before. 534 million pieces of data came into the hands of the NSA, more than tripling.

This concerns metadata, such as who called, how long and the number of characters in messages, the Reuters news agency explains on the basis of a government report released Friday. The data was requested by the NSA under the USA Freedom Act, which states that untargeted wiretapping is not allowed, but that each request to a telecom provider must justify what the data is for, for example for a terrorism case.

Although the number of tapped data for 2017 is significantly more than for 2016, a US government spokesperson says it has only made a request for 40 people to view telecom data. Because the data of everyone with whom this person has been in contact has to be handed over, large numbers of logs can still be produced. It is also possible that duplication occurs because each provider must keep its own logs, a spokesperson for the security services told Reuters.

The number of foreigners being tracked by the NSA is also increasing. In the past year, 129,080 data were requested, an increase of about 20 percent. This data comes from, for example, tech companies such as Google, which may be American, but also store a lot of data from, for example, Europeans. The NSA does not need to seek court permission to intercept non-US data.