Court rules NSA can't keep phone snoop data for more than 5 years

The court hearing the reform proposals for the National Security Agency's surveillance practices has reportedly ruled that the US government cannot keep phone record database for longer than five years.

Judge Reggie Walton said that such a practice of retaining phone record evidence for EEF and ACLU lawsuits would further infringe on the privacy interests of Americans.

Walton said that the US government sought to retain the records not for national security but because some of them might be relevant in civil litigation, in which the destruction of those very same records was requested, The Verge reports.

The FISA court had filed a ruling, allowing NSA to collect phone data in bulk, but mostly destroy it after five years. However, the Department of Justice pointed to a ban on destroying evidence that was pertinent to a court case, prompting ACLU, EFF, and others to file a suit for making it illegal to purge the records.

The report said that the groups that would be benefiting from having evidence retained didn't necessarily want it, and the Department of Justice made only a perfunctory case for keeping it.

Walton said that the government makes no attempt to explain why it believes the records were relevant, adding that the request to retain the records seemed to be motivated by 'fear' that judges might censure it for destroying evidence, the report added.