WASHINGTON  – The U.S. National Security Agency is ready
to end later this month collecting Americans’ domestic call records in bulk and
move to a more targeted system, meeting a legislative deadline imposed earlier
this year, according to a government memo seen by Reuters.

The memo,
sent on Monday from the NSA to relevant committees in the U.S. Congress, stated
that the spy agency “has successfully developed a technical architecture
to support the new program” in time for it to become operational as
scheduled on Nov. 29.

In
stating the program’s progress and the NSA’s intent to use the new system, the
memo appeared to rebut claims by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard
Burr, a Republican security hawk, who told Reuters last week that he
anticipated the new program would never be used because it was overly
cumbersome and slow.

Congress
passed legislation earlier this year that brought an end to the NSA’s
indiscriminate gathering of U.S. phone metadata, a practice exposed by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden more than two years ago.

The
legislation, known as the USA Freedom Act, called for a six-month transition
period after which the NSA could only access targeted data from telephone
providers with judicial approval.

“While
our work is not yet complete, testing of internal systems functionality at both
NSA and the telecommunications providers has begun, and exchanges of test files
with the providers are under way,” the NSA’s memo read.

It added
that it would be ready to begin the new system on Nov. 29 and that the NSA
plans to provide further updates in early 2016 about the program’s
implementation in addition to “a comparison between operations under [the]
new program and those under the soon-to-expire bulk collection program.”

Earlier
on Monday, a U.S. federal judge ordered the NSA to stop collecting the call
records of a lawyer and his firm, a narrow and largely symbolic victory for
privacy advocates that does not affect the scheduled shut down of the full
program later this month.