NSA Chief Opens Door to Narrower Data Collection

The departing National Security Agency chief offered senators an unexpected option for restructuring the agency's US phone-data collection program: narrow it to obtain only terrorism-related data.

The remarks by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander were striking because the government's justification for the data-collection program has been that the NSA needs the full database of Americans' call records to uncover otherwise unknown terrorist connections. But Gen. Alexander instead signaled that the information the NSA needs about terrorist connections might be obtainable without first collecting what officials have termed "the whole haystack" of US phone data. Explaining the option, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that intelligence agencies could "look at what data you actually need and get only that data." Gen. Alexander suggested that teasing out the relevant data would involve a mechanism under which the NSA would make classified requests to phone companies asking for data only for phone numbers associated with terrorist suspects. He added that a similar model could be established for data swaps between the government and the private sector on cybersecurity threats, as the NSA seeks to "provide early warning for cyber."