3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature
December 03, 2015
One 'Call Monitoring' Effort We Could Do Without
By Rory J. Thompson, Web Editor
As most everyone in the call center business knows, “call monitoring” serves a valuable and much-needed function. The best way to stay on top of your business and keeps employees on task (and message) is to monitor your calls, and offer help or constructive criticism where needed. As the old saying goes, “We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been.”
But there is also another kind of “call monitoring” that’s been going on for some time, which is thankfully coming to an end.
It was announced over the recent Thanksgiving weekend that the National Security Agency’s (News - Alert) phone surveillance and data collection program – which had been running for over a decade – is over.
According to a little-noticed report from Utah’s KCSG-TV, “the NSA program shut down at midnight Saturday, ending the daily tracking of millions of Americans’ phone records after 14 years.”
The report noted that the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the phone call monitoring illegal earlier this year.
“Under the USA Freedom Act, the NSA and law enforcement agencies can no longer collect telephone calling records in bulk in an effort to sniff out suspicious activity,” KCSG said. And tying in the local angle, KCSG noted that Utah Senator Mike Lee was a sponsor of that Act, which became a law six months ago.
The upshot is that analysts must now get a court order to ask telecom companies like Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless to enable monitoring of call records of specific people or groups. A recent new presidential review committee had concluded there haven't been any terrorist attacks diverted as a result of the ongoing records collection.
The ruling is the biggest reduction in U.S. spying capabilities since they expanded dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But it’s not quite “over.” The White House says data collected by the NSA over the past five years will be preserved for “data integrity purposes” through February 29, 2016.
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere