Former NSA Director: Phone Data Collection Will Probably End Soon

If Congress does nothing, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk phone data collection program will end on June 1st. While that news had civil liberties advocates cheering, they got another bit of reassurance on Monday from former NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, who told Steve Malzberg that he sees the program ending.

“I think our government has indicated that if Congress doesn’t act, the NSA is going to pull in its tent on this program,” said Hayden, a strong defender of the NSA’s surveillance programs.

Hayden urged Congress to act to extend the program, and said it would be “bad” if the surveillance were to end. He also acknowledged “legal technicalities” that would allow the agency to continue collecting phone records past June 1st.

Legal experts say the Obama Administration’s National Security Council could convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve the program under different guidelines, although an administration spokesman said they would not seek that defense.

Hayden said this loophole is “perhaps legal,” but it would be “very much contested” and not worth the effort. As Mediaite reported before, re-authorizing NSA data collection could prove a difficult task for the Republican-controlled Congress, especially because, on issues like this one, the party is deeply divided along neoconservative and libertarian ideological lines.

Watch the video below, via Newsmax TV (starts around 6:55):

[Image via screengrab]

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