Saturday marked the end of the National Security Agency’s gathering information about the phone calls of millions of Americans indiscriminately.
A law passed over the summer overhauled the government’s authority to collect so-called telephone metadata with a framework that provides for phone companies to hold such records subject to the government’s obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that authorizes their release.
The change, embodied in the USA Freedom Act, originated with revelations by Edward Snowden that the government was collecting phone records of Americans in bulk and randomly. The law gave the government 180 days, until Nov. 29, to comply.
In a ruling on Nov. 9 that held such collections likely unconstitutional, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia noted that the end of bulk collection would not be “the last chapter in the ongoing struggle to balance privacy rights and national security interests under our Constitution in an age of evolving technological wizardry.”