One of the key points in the “fact sheet” that the White House published about its plan to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone record data is that while the NSA will no longer have possession of phone data, it will still have access to it. Under the newly proposed program, the White House document notes, the NSA would still have the ability to request data without a new court order in an emergency, and “[telecommunications] companies would be compelled by court order to provide technical assistance to ensure that the records can be queried and that results are transmitted to the government in a usable format and in a timely manner.” In order to be able to live up to that mandate and deliver datasets for all numbers that are two “hops” from a specified phone number in a “timely manner,” one of two things would have to happen.