NSA Collecting Phone Records of MILLIONS of Verizon Customers Daily

[KenFSU]

Doesn't get much worse than this.

Between this, the IRS fiasco, and the AP phone record grab, Obama deserves to be removed from office immediately.

Every bit as bad as Bush at this point.

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk â€" regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data â€" the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to â€" was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once â€" everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target â€" but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman

[KenFSU]

Here's the CNN story (above is from the Guardian, who broke the story this morning):

(CNN) -- The U.S. government has obtained a top secret court order that requires Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency on an "ongoing daily basis," the UK-based Guardian newspaper reported.

The four-page order, which The Guardian published on its website Wednesday, requires the communications giant to turn over "originating and terminating" telephone numbers as well as the location, time and duration of the calls -- and demands that the order be kept secret.

If genuine, it gives the NSA blanket access to the records of millions of Verizon customers' domestic and foreign phone calls made between April 25, when the order was signed, and July 19, when it expires.

While the report infuriated people across the country -- former Vice President Al Gore called the idea "obscenely outrageous" -- a senior official in the Obama administration defended the idea of such an order early Thursday.
Report: U.S. phone records go to the NSA

Without acknowledging whether the order exists, the administration official emphasized that such an order does not include collection of "the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call."

"Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States," the unnamed official said in a written statement to media.

The official also insisted that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes intelligence collection. Activities "are subject to strict controls and procedures under oversight of the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA Court, to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties."

7 things to know

That response was unlikely to quell the quickly growing criticism.

"While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking," said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Gore, in a tweet, also criticized the move.

"In the digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" he said.

Verizon spokesman Edward McFadden declined to comment on the report.

According to the document published by The Guardian, Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court signed a "secondary order" granting an FBI request for access to the records.

The FBI did not respond to a CNN request for comment. The NSA told CNN it will respond "as soon as we can."

The order does not say why the request was made, but it bans the government and Verizon from making the contents public.

It says the order will be declassified in April 2038.

Analyst: How the order might help fight terrorism

Former FBI Assistant Director Tom Fuentes, a CNN contributor, suggested one way such an order might help fight terrorism.

"If a phone number comes up being connected to someone of suspicion, then (investigators) can go back and look at all of the numbers that phone number called or was called by, how long the calls were, what location the calls were made from, that type of information," he said on CNN's "Starting Point."

"It's not that someone or some group of analysts can sit there and monitor 50 million phone calls going through the computers. But it would create the ability to go back and see if you could connect phone calls."

For example, he said, it could allow investigators to go back and look at phone records of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Normally, phone companies would not maintain those records for long due to storage capacity, Fuentes said. With such an order, the records will be maintained by the NSA and "held for future investigations."

'Beyond Orwellian'

But some organizations that track privacy issues say they're unaware of the government having ever taken such sweeping action.

"As far as we know, this order from the FISA court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S.," the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.

The American Civil Liberties Union called for an immediate end to the order and a congressional investigation.

"It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director.

"It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."

It is not the first time such an action has been taken.

In 2006, it was revealed that the NSA was secretly collecting telephone records as part of an effort to root out potential terror plots.

At that time, Verizon denied reports that it was providing the NSA with data from customers' domestic calls. The company said that while it is committed to helping the government protect against terrorist attacks, "we will always make sure that any assistance is authorized by law and that our customers' privacy is safeguarded."

The news about the Verizon order comes as the Obama administration is under fire following revelations that the Justice Department seized two months of telephone records of a number of Associated Press reporters and editors, saying the requests were part of an investigation into the leak of classified information.

Justice officials haven't specified the leak that triggered the probe, but the AP has said it believes the investigation focuses on its account of a foiled plot to bomb a U.S. airliner in May 2012.

[JeffreyS]

Bush, Obama, congress and the judiciary all in on as routine. As naive as the libertarians are about most issues I will stand with them against this crap.

[rvrsdediva]

Can you please explain why you lay this at the foot of President Obama?

[bill]

Can you please explain why you lay this at the foot of President Obama?

He just found out about it........low level employee...........you tube video.......Bushs fault

[KenFSU]

Can you please explain why you lay this at the foot of President Obama?

[rvrsdediva]

So depending on how you look at this chart there's about 5 levels between the president and the NSA, still not getting it.

[simms3]

These scandals are getting to be almost comedic.  O is really screwing up - he has too many LARGE scandals under his belt now to claim some scenario of plausible deniability.

[FSBA]

[fsquid]

Can you please explain why you lay this at the foot of President Obama?

guess the buck doesn't stop there?

[carpnter]

Can you please explain why you lay this at the foot of President Obama?

If you don't believe President Obama was aware of this, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. 

The Senate was kept in the loop and was aware of this according to Diane Feinstein.  To think that the President didn't know is naive

[rvrsdediva]

I never said the president didn't know.  I asked for an explanation as to why someone would think him solely responsible.  Of course he knew, the Patriot Act has been in effect for years.

[Lunican]

Wait, so everyone is against this now? I thought this has been public knowledge for years and it was deemed a great thing.

[carpnter]

I never said the president didn't know.  I asked for an explanation as to why someone would think him solely responsible.  Of course he knew, the Patriot Act has been in effect for years.

He is the person in charge, the buck stops with him, since he was aware of it, he is ultimately responsible for it.  This isn't some staffer acting independently.  He has the power to shut it down, he chose not to.  He spoke out against this when he was a US Senator.  What made it wrong then, but OK now?

If you want to defend him, fine, but don't pretend he isn't responsible for it , nor pretend he isn't a bigger hypocrite than the previous occupant of the White House.

[JeffreyS]

These scandals are getting to be almost comedic.  O is really screwing up - he has too many LARGE scandals under his belt now to claim some scenario of plausible deniability.

I disagree.
First off this isn't a scandal it is bad policy in which both parties, The last two presidents , congress and the judiciary all have and still support. (and a good deal of the public too).

Benghazi fake controversy.

Media snooping again not a scandal it is the current bad policy both parties support and all of the other culprits from the first answer as well.

IRS that one is big and a different story real meat, real controversy and really bad.  However it is going to be impossible to pin this one on the President officially and probably with most of the public.

The Media is mad at the President right now but the jobs numbers tomorrow and over the rest of his term will be what keeps or loses his political clout and ability to get things done.

I think the Republicans have a real issue of over playing their hand so much with respect to Benghazi that lots of people are tuning out the bad policy issues and the real IRS scandal.