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Freedom Act. The data in these reports conveyed the CDR program’s scale, both in absolute
terms and relative to the number of orders issued by the FISA court. 297 As noted above, for
example, NSA collected 434,238,543 records based on 14 court orders in 2018. That report also
disclosed for the first time the number of unique phone numbers contained within those records:
more than 19 million. 298 The reports have provided progressively greater detail about how NSA
and other agencies conduct these counts and why they opt for certain approaches over others.
The significant effort that NSA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other
agencies invest in compiling and declassifying this information is an important investment in
public understanding of these activities.
297 (U) These reports also discuss the number of queries that NSA analysts ran against the agency’s holdings of USA
Freedom Act CDRs. These counts were likely over inclusive, however, for reasons discussed elsewhere in this
report. See 2018 Statistical Transparency Report at 31; see also Part III(B).
298 (U) 2018 Statistical Transparency Report at 30.
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