Obama's NSA Is Collecting Verizon Phone Records

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 Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013
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 – 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.

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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 – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – 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 — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — 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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

 

Civil liberties groups react to report on government collecting phone records​

The following are statements released by civil liberties groups in response to the report that the Obama administration has been collecting the phone records of U.S.-based Verizon customers.

Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director: "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents. 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."

Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office: "Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation. This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public's and the government's understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability."

The Center for Constitutional Rights: "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. It also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing information about the order to anyone other than their counsel. The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it. The Patriot Act provision requires the FBI to notify Congress about the number of such warrants, but this single order covering millions of people is a deceptive end-run around that disclosure requirement."

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Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2013/06/06/civil-liberties-groups-react-report-government-collecting-phone-records/#ixzz2VReicK6U​

 

But I remember;

 

Everyone should listen to the clip posted above. Obama's last sentence is "That is not who we are". No, that is not who WE are. But, that's exactly who YOU are. A lying, two-faced charade of a president.

 

Using programs put into place and employed by the Bush administration, and apparently authorized under the Patriot Act. I doubt you had a problem with this kind of thing back then and I'm pretty sure that if we had a Republican sitting in the White House you wouldn't have a problem with it now.

 

Does anyone remember the liberal outrage when this happened under the Bush administration:

View attachment 1725

Adding to Bush's record of shame
May 17, 2006|By Kevin James Miller

Elmhurst — This is regarding "The NSA has your number" (Editorial, May 12). It's tempting with each new moral outrage committed by the Bush administration to tick them all off, to make clear to the world and to history the vast record of shame being piled up.

But I will confine myself to the news story broken last week.

What President Bush's National Security Agency and Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth phone services have done is evil and stupid.

As I understand where Bush is coming from, literally anything done in opposition to terrorism is, by definition, good since it is in opposition to evil.

I remind the world that, after World War II, compensation was paid to Japanese-Americans locked up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR's order to lock up his fellow innocent citizens was wrong and evil, although it was done as a blow against the wickedness of our enemies.

An online dictionary defines "evil" as "morally bad or wrong; wicked . . . causing ruin, injury or pain; harmful."

What the Bush/Verizon/AT&T/BellSouth scheme harms is the idea of innocence. The poisonous balderdash that folksy, good-old-boy authoritarian thugs always say, "if you are innocent then you have nothing worry about," doesn't hold water for five seconds. What good is it that the Bush Mob tells me and my fellow citizens this if they are already treating me like I am guilty?

The Bush/Verizon/AT&T/BellSouth scheme is stupid. If terrorism is a threat is national security, how is this smart war planning? If terrorism is a crime, how is this smart police work? It is like in the fight against a battlefield enemy putting one's troops everywhere. It is like investigating a homicide in Chicago and ordering your detectives to detain and question everyone in the city.

It's a brainless use of limited resources. I have ancestors and relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War, for the Union and in World Wars I and II.

Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, everything those good people sacrificed and fought for is being taken apart by George W. Bush.

And I'm sick of it.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-05-17/news/0605170136_1_george-w-bush-bellsouth-verizon

 

Takiji, don't even try to defend this. It makes you look petty.

 

It is a fair question. What was your position on The NSA's actions back in 2006?

 

What was Takiji's question?

 

Double post

 

"Obama's NSA" I love the titles these conspiracy idiots give every thread. Thank you Patriot Act! The Bush gift that just keeps on giving.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/27/patriot-act-extension-signed-obama-autopen_n_867851.html
That does not say Bush signed it. It says Obama signed it. And he signed it because the Bush Patriot Act had expired.

 

I've brought this up on a few occasions over the years, but don't know what people thought of it at the time, besides an off-the-cuff remark here and there. Maybe you all thought I was just being paranoid lol...but nah, I'm sure most of us already understood that this type of thing has been going on for many years. I knew the possibility of it under Clinton, and confirmed it during Jr.'s reign. Obama has the option, and uses it. It's one reason I'll never own a cell-phone.

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

I'm satisfied as to the legitimacy of the claims above, but some may not be. The point being, this is already a "given", from my point-of-view.

 

The Patriot Act is a joke, and I blame all in government who voted it in. Is this Bush's or Obama's doing? No, it is Congress and the House, as they are the ones who wrote and authorized the legislation. If you want to place blame, place it intelligently and with the proper people.

 

Source: http://www.aclu.org/government-location-tracking-cell-phones-gps-devices-and-license-plate-readers

Bipartisan agreement.

Begun under Reagan.

While Jr. was President.

 

Oh! Boy! Now they are watching us as we talk! REALLY!

http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-funneling...-223619893.html;_ylt=A2KJ2PZRELFRPTkAczXQtDMD

 

Defend it? You know better than that. I've been critical of Obama's trashing of the Bill of Rights from the beginning. And you have always been quick to agree with me. But not, I think, because you have any particular concern about privacy and due process being thrown out the window in the interest of state security.

I'm sure you were fine with it when Bush and his band of war criminals were doing the same thing and you'd still be fine with it if we had a Republican in the White House. I believe you get upset not because you think it's wrong, you get upset because it's Obama.

 

With the qualification that the president, whoever that might be, has far more discretion to act without Congressional approval on matters of state security than used to be the case. I don't hear Obama calling for the repeal of the Patriot Act any more than Bush did. Rather, he has quite enthusiastically it seems accepted every once of new presidential power that has accrued to the office since 9/11.