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tightened up their operational security.” 307 Their shift to IP-based communications, including
social media and encrypted chat apps, has not made telephony irrelevant to counterterrorism—
people still use phones—but, as academic researchers have noted, it has become less central. 308
“We are dealing with a challenge right now: New technologies that enable encryption and allow
them to be fairly confident that they are communicating in a way that can’t be detected,” one US
official told the news organization ProPublica in 2016. 309 “They know how to communicate
securely.” 310

(U) This shift suggests that focusing on the full spectrum of digital communications
technologies, rather than voice telephony in isolation, would likely yield greatest
counterterrorism value going forward. Whether the complexities that led to compliance and
data-integrity problems during the life of this program are likely to persist into the future
depends on predictive judgments about the future of telephony networks and company billing
practices, as well as the possibility that the government could develop technical approaches to
mitigate these complexities. The technical experts at NSA and outside technologists familiar
with the intricacies of telephony networks would be best positioned to render those predictive
judgments. Given the persistence of terrorist threats to the homeland, Congress may wish to ask
agencies whether they need alternative tools to meet the operational need that the USA Freedom
Act and the prior bulk CDR program were designed to address.

(U) It is also important to note that USA Freedom Act CDRs were only one of several
avenues by which NSA and FBI can obtain and analyze communications metadata for
counterterrorism purposes. NSA collects phone metadata and electronic communications
metadata as part of its global signals-intelligence mission carried out under Executive Order
12333. This metadata, stored in an internal repository, can be used to protect the homeland from
international terrorism: NSA’s Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata
Analysis allow “identifiers associated with both non-US persons and US persons to be used to
query phone metadata and electronic communications metadata that NSA obtains through other
lawful collection methods.” 311 NSA can also collect communications metadata under Section

307 (U) Bipartisan Policy Center, Digital Counterterrorism: Fighting Jihadists Online, 15 (May 2018).

308 (U) Susan Landau and Asaf Lubin, Explaining the Anomalies, Examining the Value: Should the USA Freedom
Act’s Metadata Program be Extended?, at 62 (2019).
309 (U) Sebastian Rotella, ISIS via WhatsApp: “Blow Yourself Up, O Lion,” ProPublica (July 11, 2016).
310 (U) Sebastian Rotella, ISIS via WhatsApp: “Blow Yourself Up, O Lion,” ProPublica (July 11, 2016).

311 (U) Part II(A)(1).

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