From CATO’s Julian Sanchez:
On Tuesday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to draw attention to an important story about a large scale National Security Agency surveillance program—though largely for the wrong reasons.
Wow! The NSA has deleted 685 million phone calls and text messages. Privacy violations? They blame technical irregularities. Such a disgrace. The Witch Hunt continues!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018
There are two significant errors here and one important truth. The first error is that NSA is in the process of deleting “Call Detail Records”—or metadata—about phone calls and text messages, not the calls and messages themselves. The second error is that the records being purged were acquired pursuant to a counterterrorism authority: They have nothing to do with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (or “The Witch Hunt,” as Trump is fond of characterizing it). The important truth is that the dramatic purge of hundreds of millions of records is indeed an attempt to remedy “technical irregularities” that led to privacy violations: the acquisition by NSA of large numbers of private telecommunications records it was not legally entitled to receive.