Lawmakers Said to Reach Deal on NSA's Phone-Data Program
By Chris Strohm and Laura Litvan Mar 26, 2014 11:37 AM ET
After eight months of disclosures on U.S. spying on allies and foes alike, the fix proposed by President Barack Obama and top lawmakers still would let the government access phone and Internet records.
The proposal gaining support would bar the National Security Agency from stockpiling phone records yet allow the government to go to AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and other U.S. carriers to obtain the data, such as numbers dialed and call durations without content.
“The phone companies are always going to keep your phone records,” James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a phone interview. “The NSA won’t hold it. It will just take a little longer and court approval to get it.”
Revelations about U.S. surveillance by former U.S. contractor Edward Snowden last year has set off a global debate over the trade-offs between privacy and security.
There doesn’t appear to be momentum to make significant changes to other spy programs exposed by Snowden, Lewis said. Documents he leaked showed that the NSA acted to weaken standards used to encrypt and protect data, hacked into fiber optic cables abroad to steal information from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., and possibly infected millions of computers globally with malware.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/lawmakers-said-to-reach-deal-on-nsa-s-phone-data-program.html