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NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily
06 June 13
Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama
Read the Verizon court order in full here
Obama administration justifies surveillancehe 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.
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."
Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman
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