posted June 06, 2013 11:27 AM            

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Thursday that the top secret court order for telephone records is a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice. She spoke to reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

The sweeping roundup of U.S. phone records has been going on for years and was a key part of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, a U.S. official said Thursday.

The White House offered no immediate on-the-record comment. A senior administration official did not confirm the Guardian newspaper report that the NSA has been collecting the records, but the authenticity of the document was not disputed by the White House. The administration official insisted on anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly by name.

The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the Guardian reported. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis," to give the NSA information on all landline and mobile telephone calls of Verizon Business in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether the people are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The disclosure raised a number of questions: What was the government looking for? Were other big telephone companies under similar orders to turn over information? How was the information used?

Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted that privacy was essential in the digital era.

"Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" wrote Gore, the Democrat who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the Obama administration should disclose the facts.

"I think that they have an obligation to respond immediately," said Wyden, a frequent critic of government actions dealing with Americans' privacy.

Under Bush, the National Security Agency built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the roundup continued under authority granted in the USA Patriot Act, the official said.

The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.

The official had not seen the court order released by the Guardian newspaper but said it was consistent with similar authorizations the Justice Department has received.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment.

The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. In a brochure it distributes, which includes a DVD for reporters to view video that it provides for public relations purposes, it pledges that the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties – and its commitment to accountability," and says, "Earning the American public's trust is paramount."

Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April – 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn't specify which customers' records were being tracked.

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

The administration official said, "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls."

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks was very controversial.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with 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 Guardian said.

posted June 06, 2013 12:30 PM            

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posted June 06, 2013 12:59 PM            

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/06/lindsey-graham-hey-im-glad-the-nsa-is-collecting-americans-phone-records/

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posted June 06, 2013 01:29 PM            

(NEWSER) – The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee today downplayed the revelation that the NSA is collecting millions of phone records from Verizon, Politico and CNN report:

"As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Dianne Feinstein told reporters. "This renewal is carried out by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress." She added that the government can only use the information gathered if there is "reasonable and articulate suspicion that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity." Terrorists "will come after us if they can and the only thing that we have to deter this is good intelligence to understand that a plot has been hatched and to get there before they get to us."
Saxby Chambliss called the monitoring "nothing new," and concurred with Feinstein that the information can't be accessed without the FISA court's approval. "This has been going on for seven years,” he continued. "Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."
An anonymous White House official had earlier assured Politico that the government is not allowed to actually "listen in on anyone's telephone calls."
http://m.newser.com/story/169107/nsas-verizon-monitoring-has-gone-on-for-7-years-senators.html

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A slow creep, indeed.

posted June 06, 2013 05:51 PM            

"NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it's been all these companies, not just one" William Binney told news program Democracy Now on Thursday. "They're just continuing the collection of this data on all U.S. citizens."

Binney, who worked at the NSA for almost 40 years, left the agency after the attacks of 9/11 because he objected to the expansion of its surveillance of U.S. citizens.

British newspaper The Guardian late Wednesday released an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requesting Verizon to give the NSA the details on every phone call on its landline and wireless networks on a daily basis between April 25 and July 19.

Binney estimates that the NSA collects records on 3 billion calls per day.

"These are routine orders," said Thomas Drake, another NSA whistleblower. "What's new is we're seeing an actual order, and people are surprised by it."

"We've been saying this for years from the wilderness," Drake told Democracy Now. "But it's like, hey, everybody went to sleep while the government is collecting all these records."

Drake started working for the NSA in 2001 and blew the whistle on what he saw as a wasteful and invasive program at the agency. He was later prosecuted for keeping classified information. Most of the charges were dropped before trial, and he was sentenced to one year of probation and community service.

The NSA's original charter was to eavesdrop on communications between countries, not inside the U.S. That expansion of its mission appears to have happened after 9/11, but the agency has continuously denied that it spies on domestic communications.

In March, for instance, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, emailed an Associated Press reporter about a story that described the NSA as a monitor of worldwide Internet data and phone calls.

"NSA collects, monitors, and analyzes a variety of (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) signals and communications for indications of threats to the United States and for information of value to the U.S. government," she wrote. " (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) is the operative word. NSA is not an indiscriminate vacuum, collecting anything and everything."

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, three of the largest phone companies, said they had no comment on the matter. A representative from Sprint did not respond to a message. Verizon's general counsel emailed employees Thursday saying that the company has an obligation to obey court orders, but did not confirm the existence of an order.

James Bamford, a journalist and author of several books on the NSA, said it's very surprising to see that the agency tracks domestic calls, including local calls. In 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA was secretly collecting a database of domestic call information. However, some phone companies denied any involvement in such a program.

Bamford's assumption was that the uproar over a separate, post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program and the departure of the Bush administration meant that the NSA had been reined in.

"Here we are, under the Obama administration, doing it sort of like the Bush administration on steroids," he said in an interview with the Associated Press. "This order here is about as broad as it can possibly get, when it comes to focusing on personal communications. There's no warrant, there's no suspicion, there's no probable cause ... it sounds like something from East Germany."

posted June 07, 2013 07:18 AM            

The content of emails and phone calls isn't tracked. The Bush administration launched the program, the Journal notes, and the Obama administration has continued it. But it's controlled by a "robust legal regime," says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, noting that data is "subject to strict restrictions on handling" and the system is reviewed about once every 90 days (Clapper is also defending the PRISM data-gathering program). Officials actually view less than 1% of records, says another official. "We are trying to find a needle in a haystack, and this is the haystack," notes a former top Pentagon official.
http://m.newser.com/story/169143/nsa-also-tracks-att-sprint-users.html

posted June 07, 2013 07:22 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Randall:
Just saw on PBS that the government has also been spying on our emails, audio, and video (through nine internet companies). The point of the Fourth Amendment is to prevent searches of this nature.

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Harkening back to another thread, the en masse collection of our genetic info by the government has the potential to make this possible with our bodies, our traits.
That's why I oppose it.

posted June 08, 2013 07:43 AM            

Are you the TP from NYC ?

That rhymes like a line from a song.!

posted June 08, 2013 08:56 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by mockingbird:
Harkening back to another thread, the en masse collection of our genetic info by the government has the potential to make this possible with our bodies, our traits.
[b]That's why I oppose it.

[/B]

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Indeed, our bodies, our traits .. who`s fourth amendment? The govs... ours..

It all kinda gets blurred here because what is protected seems to change too often with this admin.

posted June 08, 2013 09:24 PM            

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2 013/06/08/leno-we-wanted-president-listens-all-americans-now-we-have-one#ixzz2Vg60ViKI

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