WASHINGTON — Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller warned on Wednesday that dismantling the National Security Agency’s (NSA) once-secret programme that is keeping records of billions of domestic phone calls by Americans would slow down investigators as they seek to stop terrorist attacks.
The NSA’s log programme came to light after it was leaked to The Guardian and The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who then fled to Hong Kong.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr Mueller addressed a proposal that requires that telephone companies retain calling logs for five years — the period the NSA is keeping them — for investigators to consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all.
He cautioned that it would take time to subpoena the companies for numbers of interest and get the answers back.
“The point being that it will take an awful long time,” Mr Mueller said.
General Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, had hinted at a House hearing on Tuesday that he was evaluating changes to the domestic calling log programme and that he would eventually report back to Congress on the advantages and disadvantages of changing it.
He also raised the issue of “speed in crisis” as a major detractor.
Mr Mueller provided more details on why national security officials were reluctant to take such a step.
He said that, under the current law, companies are not required to retain such records and some dispose of them much sooner than five years.
Also, rather than being able to instantly query the complete database to see whom a suspect has been in contact with, he said, investigators would have to present legal paperwork to a half-dozen carriers and wait for them to gather and provide the records.
Mr Mueller did not explain why it would take so long for telephone companies to respond to a subpoena for calling data linked to a particular number, especially in a national security investigation.
The domestic call log programme, which vacuums up metadata such as which numbers were in contact and the time and duration of the calls, started as one of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance programmes.
Under recently declassified procedures, the NSA can only consult the database about numbers for which there is reasonable suspicion to believe they are linked to terrorism, and such consultations are audited.
Fewer than 300 such numbers were the basis of inquiries last year, the agency said.
Mr Snowden’s disclosures have ignited a political furore over the balance between privacy rights and national security, but President Barack Obama and congressional leaders of both parties have backed the programmes and there has been no significant effort to roll them back.
Agencies
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