The NSA has reportedly stopped data-mining Americans' phone and SMS records

Since 2001, the NSA has secretly ingested the calling records of virtually every US mobile phone subscriber, with the covert participation of the mobile carries; the program -- authorized by a secret order of then-president GW Bush -- remained secret until it was disclosed through documents provided to journalists by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

After the Snowden revelations, a cowardly Congress retroactively legalized the NSA's domestic surveillance program with a 2015 bill called the USA Freedom Act (yes, seriously). The Act expires this year and there has been little action to reauthorize the program after it does.

Now, Luke Murry -- a national security advisor to the House Republican minority -- has claimed in a Lawfare podcast interview that the system has not been used "in months," and that the GOP has no appetite for renewing it.

Murry is an advisor to Representative Kevin McCarthy [R-CA], who quickly threw Murry under the bus, stating that Murry "was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue."

The NSA has never provided any evidence that the program has thwarted a single terrorist attack. Last year, it was forced to delete all data gathered under the program because an unnamed mobile carrier had provided the Agency with more data than it requested, causing it to overcollect, even by the lax standards set out in the (barf) USA Freedom Act.

Problems with the system emerged last year, when the National Security Agency said it had decided to delete its entire database of records gathered since the Freedom Act system became operational.