Electronic surveillance

NSA collected over 151mn phone records in 2016 despite surveillance law changes

The NSA collected over 151 million phone records from Americans last year, while having warrants for only 42 terrorist suspects, an annual report shows. In 2015, the agency’s snooping powers were cut following Edward Snowden’s revelations.

The new transparency report revealing the agency’s haul was released Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The records include communicational “metadata,” showing who contacted whom, but not what they said. The amount of collected data is still lower compared to previous years, when the National Security Agency (NSA) collected “billions of records per day,” according to a 2014 report.