Obama Will End Mass Collection of Phone Data

President Obama “said that the U.S. will end its mass collection of American phone data and no longer will house the information inside the government, a victory for civil libertarians that marks the most significant curtailment of U.S. surveillance practices in more than a decade,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The most immediate changes to spy operations affect a National Security Agency program that collects data on nearly all U.S. phone calls. Under the new presidential directive, intelligence officials are now required to obtain an order from a secret national-security court for government searches of phone data, and the scope of individual searches has been scaled back.”