Plan will be prepared by Friday.
The Obama administration will soon introduce a proposal to restructure the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The Justice Department is scheduled to present a plan to do so by this Friday, March 28th.
The plan is expected leave the task of holding metadata with businesses while requiring companies to turn the data over to the government.
The administration plans to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to extend the program for another 90 days until the new plan is deemed ready for implementation.
The U.S. has spent $1.5 billion building a data processing center in Utah. The center requires a three million gallon water tank just to cool its computers and holds an estimated five zettabytes of data – equivalent to 62.5 billion iPhones. In theory, this is enough space to store every email, Google search and surveillance camera video in America.
According to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, “I’ve had private conversations with people that used to work in the [Bush] administration, and there reaction has been ‘woah, we never could’ve gotten away with even half of what, apparently, the Obama administration is now doing.’”
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