As part of their broad surveillance program the National Security Agency ran a test project that would allow them to collect and track the locations of cellphones between 2010 and 2011; the program was not adapted for further use, according to the New York Times.
NSA chief Keith Alexander revealed the existence of the program to a Senate committee on Wednesday. After former contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of the program to the press earlier this year the spy agency admitted that they had collected information from phone calls but denied that they had tracked the location of users making the calls, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"I would just say that this may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now," Alexander told the committee.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been very active during the hearings trying to learn the depths of the surveillance program and whether or not the rights of Americans were infringed upon by the NSA, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret - even when the truth would not compromise national security," Wyden said.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, kept most of the details about the program to himself during the testimony, the New York Times reports.
"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," Clapper said.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is in the process of drafting legislation that would end the controversial practice of storing the metadata from the phone calls of American citizens, according to the New York Times.
"The government has not made its case that bulk collection of domestic phone records is an effective counterterrorism tool, especially in light of the intrusion on American privacy," Leahy said.
