<p>The National Security Agency (NSA) on Thursday said it would be deleting millions of recorded phone calls and text messages after learning of &ldquo;technical irregularities&rdquo; that caused it to collect information it wasn&rsquo;t authorized to receive. ;</p>
<p>Analysts in May noticed &ldquo;technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers.&rdquo;</p>
<p>General counsel Glenn Gerstell in an interview confirmed that &ldquo;one or more&rdquo; telecom companies had responded to the NSA&rsquo;s requests for data on certain individuals by sending data logs including far more than the relevant data. As it was &ldquo;infeasible&rdquo; to comb through all the calls and texts to find the authorized data, the NSA decided to delete everything. The deletions allegedly began on May 23rd. ;</p>
<p>The records in question date back to 2015 and were obtained under the<em> Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act</em> (FISA). The NSA confirmed this week it had ;addressed the &ldquo;root cause of the problem&rdquo; to prevent the accident from happening again.</p>
<p>&ldquo;While the step shows that the NSA is willing to err on the side of caution, it continues a streak of privacy violations at the agency since its bulk phone data collection fell under the <em>Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act</em> in 2004,&rdquo; reports <em>EnGadget</em>. &ldquo;It also illustrates the problem with keeping such large-scale monitoring in check. The system depends on both the NSA and telecoms strictly honoring the law, and all it takes is a mistake to create a serious privacy breach.&rdquo;</p>
<p><strong>Author&#8217;s Note:</strong> Let&rsquo;s remember that recording phone calls &ldquo;by accident&rdquo; is still illegal. The NSA, which in 2017 faced legal scrutiny over its Internet surveillance data collection program, is supposed to be banned from spying on US citizens unless ;it is ;working with the FBI.</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note:</strong> This was over 600 million records, how is that and &#8216;accident&#8217;?</p>