NSA Secretly Collecting Millions Of Verizon Customer Phone Records
The National Security Agency has been collecting millions of phone records of Verizon customers in secret since the end of April, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the court order.
The court order, requested by the NSA, requires Verizon, one of America’s largest communications companies, to give the agency information on all of the phone calls in its systems on an “ongoing, daily basis.”
The order applies to calls made in the United States, as well as between the US and other countries. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted the request for the FBI on April 25.
The order means that the NSA has access to millions of calls each day for a period of three months, which ends on July 19. The news came as a shock to many Americans and will likely reignite the debate about government involvement and privacy of the American people.
The blanket order allows the NSA to learn the numbers of both parties in a call, as well as location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of each call. The contents of the conversation are not covered. It marks the first time the Obama administration has seen communication records for millions of US citizens being collected indiscriminately.
The blanket order is unusual for FISA, which usually directs the production of records to a certain target or a finite set of individually named targets. The order also specifically forbids Verizon from disclosing the apparent privacy breach to the public.
The document was signed by Judge Roger Vinson and comes as the Obama administration is also under fire for other privacy and First Amendment problems, as well as alleged partisan discrimination on behalf of the IRS toward conservative groups. It is already being criticized over a search of Associated Press journalists’ phone records, as well as the emails of a Fox television reporter.
Kurt Opsahl, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is already suing the NSA for surveillance inside the United States. He stated of the Verizon report, “That’s not the society we’ve built in the United States. It’s not the society we set forth in the Constitution, and it’s not the society we should have.”
The report is the first piece of evidence showing the Obama administration has continued a broad campaign of domestic surveillance that started under President George W. Bush. Previously papers reported in 2005 that the NSA was wiretapping Americans without warrants on international calls.
It is unclear what fallout the report will have.
[Image via ShutterStock]
