No longer will the NSA rely on the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to collect all phone records. Instead it will have to contact telecommunications companies holding the data for them. Unlike general warrants leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden such as the one issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) granting the NSA access to all Verizon customers’ records, the new program only allows the NSA to collect records from telecoms when a “specific selection term” pertaining to limited data is outlined in a FISC warrant, which will limit investigations of the metadata to six months.
The move has encouraged a wide variety of opinions to be voiced.
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