The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has authorized a 90-day extension to the Section 215 bulk telephone collection program used by the National Security Agency, giving the agency through the end of February to run the program in the absence of legislation establishing a new authority.

Several months ago, President Barack Obama ordered an end to the Section 215 collection, as it had been carried out for years, saying that the government should no longer hold the untold millions of phone records collected under the program. Instead, rather than the government periodically collecting and storing those records, the phone companies would instead keep control of the data and the NSA would have the ability to query them under specific limitations.

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