The NSA's vaunted cell phone metadata collection program, often defended on the grounds that its comprehensive sweep of information allows the government to uncover unseen connections, only collected about 30 percent of all such information as of last summer. Lost in the pre-Christmas blur was an NBC News interview with one of the members of the group President Obama tasked with reviewing the government's surveillance toolkit. In that interview, Geoffrey Stone suggested that the agency's metadata collection was deliberately incomplete. "Asked if the NSA was collecting the records of 75 percent of phone calls, an estimate that has been used in briefings to Congress," NBC's Michael Isikoff reported, "Stone said the real number was classified but 'not anything close to that' and far lower."



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