The system of mass wiretapping of the population was practically useless for the FBI

The mass wiretapping system was developed by the US National Security Agency.

Mass listening to the country's population, recording all conversations and text messages - must be very effective measures in the fight against crime? With such a system, terrorists will be at a glance at the special services? It turns out, absolutely not.

A declassified study shows that a system for analyzing logs of telephone conversations and text messages of US residents cost taxpayers $ 100 million for 2015-2019, but helped the FBI initiate only one more or less significant investigation, writes the NY Times.

Moreover, just twice during this five-year period, the program generated unique information that the FBI did not yet possess. The audit was conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. On February 25, 2020, a report was submitted to the US Congress.

“Based on a single report, the FBI checked one person, but after checking it determined that no further action is required,” the report says. “The second report contained unique information about the phone number previously known to the US authorities, which led to the opening of an espionage investigation.”

But the high cost and low utility of the collected call records forced the National Security Agency to close the program in 2019amid continuous technical and legal problems . So the program of total listening, such as the Russian SORM, was interrupted, launched despite the objections of human rights defenders after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This information surfaced when Congress assessed whether to heed the request of the Trump administration and extend the USA Freedom Act (2015), which gives intelligence services unprecedented powers to wiretap the population.

As a result, on March 16, 2020, they decided to extend this law for 77 days . Consideration of this topic was simply postponed for two months, because now legislators have much more urgent problems in combating the virus epidemic.

But the issue of extending the law does not negate the fact that in reality the system of mass listening of the population was extremely ineffective for the FBI. The 103-page report of the Council for the Supervision of Privacy and Civil Liberties is declassified and published in the public domain (with partial censorship).



The Confidentiality Council is an independent agency created by Congress on the recommendation of a commission that studied events after 9/11. In an interview, Adam Klein, chairman of the board, welcomed the NSA’s decision to suspend the program in 2019, not only because of its high cost and low efficiency, but because of ongoing problems with telecom operators. Operators continued to send the agency telephone records that the NSA did not have the authority to collect. The NSA had to make tremendous efforts to purge the base.

“It takes a lot of common sense to acknowledge the lack of value in consuming a lot of your resources and time,” Klein said. “We want agencies to think about their data collection capabilities and scale them down where appropriate.” This is the best way to balance civil liberties and privacy with operational needs. ”

In an annex to the report, the chairman of the council also noted that telephone records are becoming less and less important as people switch to using instant messengers with encrypted messages. In addition, he noted that the government can still access some telephone logs through other means, such as traditional court subpoenas.



NY Times reported last yearabout the pessimistic assessment of the cost / effectiveness ratio that the NSA gave to its program of mass wiretapping of the population. The agency did not even express a clear position on whether the Trump administration should support the extension of the USA Freedom Act, by which the system was created. But the specific numbers that underlie this assessment were classified.

As part of its investigation, the Confidentiality Council found out a few more important facts, some of which were declassified. Now it is precisely known that the system gained access to mobile communications, and not just stationary.

It is also reported that over four years of operation of the NSA system, 15 intelligence reports have been prepared on its basis. However, 13 of these reports contained information that the FBI had already collected in other ways, like routine listening on an agenda.

The decision to create a mass wiretapping system was made in 2006 by the secret court of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the public became aware of it from documents declassified by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Proponents of the program argued that it could have prevented 9/11 attacks. But in practice, its most notable achievement, according to the reportThe 2014 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was a thorough study of a San Diego resident who, as it turned out, donated several thousand dollars to Al Shabab, an Islamic group in Somalia. There was no evidence that he was planning a terrorist attack.

In 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which put an end to the mass recording of telephone conversations under the Patriot Act, but allowed the NSA to introduce an alternative system that provided for the storage of records from telephone companies (an analogue of the latest generation of SORM, which is being introduced as part of the Spring package), shifting the cost of storing data on their shoulders.

With the permission of a judge, the NSA can quickly receive data not only about the suspect, but also about everyone with whom he contacted. The laws of geometric progression have led to the fact that such conditions in practice mean mass wiretapping of the population. In 2018, the agency received 14 court orders, but collected 434 million detailed call records involving 19 million phone numbers.

In the spring of 2018, the NSA had to clear the database of hundreds of millions of records that the agency did not have the authority to receive. In the fall of 2018, the NSA again realized that it was collecting too much data. The agency shut down the program in 2019, accusing telecom operators of sending too many unnecessary or erroneous entries.