U.S Federal Judge Stopped NSA's Plans To Destroy Collected Phone Records.

U.S District Judge in San Francisco, Judge Jeffrey White has stopped the destruction of millions of telephone records collected by the NSA more than five years ago by issued a nationwide order to safeguard evidence.


The Electronic Frontier Foundation, more commonly known as the EFF, was granted a temporary restraining order to put a stay on the record destruction, saying the phone records can serve as evidence in lawsuits that are going against the agency's surveillance practices. Another hearing will be held on March 19.

The NSA started collecting domestic phone call records in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, planned to start destroying records, as per recent ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that phone records can't be kept for in excess of five years.

The records include detailed call information (caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc.) for use in traffic analysisand social network analysis, but do not include audio information or transcripts of the content of the phone calls.

In July, 2013, EFF filed lawsuit, First Unitarian v. NSA, based on the recently published FISA court order demanding Verizon turn over all customer phone records including who is talking to whom, when and for how long — to the NSA. This so-called “metadata,” especially when collected in bulk and aggregated, allows the government to track the associations of various political and religious organizations.

EFF Also representing victims of the illegal surveillance program in Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in September 2008 seeking to stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government and government officials behind the program accountable.