The National Security Agency’s long-running mass phone surveillance program is coming to an end. As promised, the USA Freedom Act will forbid the NSA from indiscriminately collecting Americans’ call metadata at midnight on November 29th. Agents will have to get court orders to collect data from telecoms regarding specific people or groups, and then only for six months at a time — they can’t just scoop up everything in case something useful turns up. The NSA will still have access to five years’ worth of legacy data through February 29th, but that’s as far as its access will go.
Source: Reuters