posted June 05, 2013 08:06 PM            

From the article:

(snip)

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.

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

Aw, it's so nice to see the FBI and NSA working so nicely together.

*head pat*

posted June 05, 2013 09:13 PM            

quote:

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Aw, it's so nice to see the FBI and NSA working so nicely together.

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posted June 06, 2013 08:13 AM            

The contents of the call are not recorded and it is also not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone carrier complying with the massive spying project. The court order concerns all calls to, from, and within the United States.

With this so-called “metadata,” the government knows “the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication,” explains the Guardian.

The Senate’s tech-savviest member, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has been discretely warning citizens of these kinds of secretive government projects. “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” wrote Wyden and Senator Mark Udall to embattled Attorney Eric Holder.

The order apparently draws from a 2001 Bush-era provision in the Patriot Act (50 USC section 1861). The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.

Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.

Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

posted June 06, 2013 08:50 AM            

quote:

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If Verizon is, indeed, not the only carrier, I suspect we’ll be finding out in the near future.

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Frontier bought out our Verizon but you can bet they are part and parcel of the scandal .

I`d love to get my hands on Verizons
data. For once and all I could prove to my M-in-law that we speak more than twice a year .
More like twice a day