Electronic surveillance

NSA says new phone spying program meets privacy safeguards

A new system for collecting domestic telephone records meets several privacy and civil liberties benchmarks, the U.S. National Security Agency said on Friday.

The program, which some Republican presidential hopefuls have criticized because they say it puts Americans at greater risk of attack by Islamic State and other violent groups, has satisfactorily complied with eight privacy safeguards that include transparency, oversight, data minimization and use limitation since its implementation in November, according to a report released by the NSA’s Civil Liberties and Privacy Office.

The NSA ended its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans’ phone metadata, meaning the numbers and time stamps of calls but not their content, late last year after Congress passed a law reforming some of the government’s surveillance practices.