NSA Experiment Traced US Cellphone Locations

The National Security Agency in 2010 and 2011 conducted a secret pilot project to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cellphones, but the agency ultimately decided against putting such a program into play for now, according to intelligence officials.

The existence of the pilot project, which has not previously been reported, was recently declassified by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, but it has not been publicly disclosed. His statement to be read at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if he is asked is one paragraph long and contains scant details. The response says that the NSA does not currently collect locational information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision that forms the asserted legal basis of its once-secret program that is collecting logs of all domestic phone calls from telephone companies. “In 2010 and 2011, NSA received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes,” the draft response says, adding that the NSA has promised to notify Congress and seek the approval of a secret surveillance court in the future before any locational data was collected using Section 215.