Article · Conspiracies
The NSA collected Americans' call records: what the courts confirmed and what they did not
Yes, the US National Security Agency (NSA) collected Americans' telephone metadata in bulk, such as numbers dialed and length of calls. When a newspaper reported it in 2006, several companies denied it, and on 12 March 2013 the Director of National Intelligence told the Senate "No, sir." In June 2013 an order of the secret surveillance court was published, and in 2015 and 2020 two US appeals courts ruled that the program broke the law. According to the intelligence director's own statement, the program did not collect the content of calls; the courts ruled only on metadata.
This piece is not about whether intelligence agencies "hear everything". It is about one narrow claim: that the NSA was storing the call records of millions of ordinary Americans, not the conversations but data about them. The government and some of the companies denied that claim for years. The government's own documents and the courts later confirmed it.