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NSA Collecting Phone Records For Millions of Verizon Customers, Report Says
Thursday, June 6, 2013 8:33
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Published June 06, 2013FoxNews.com
NSA is Collecting Phone Records of Millions of US Verizon Customers on an ‘Ongoing Daily Basis
The Obama administration has been collecting the phone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to a British newspaper report which raised new and troubling privacy questions.
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A senior law enforcement official pushed back on the report early Thursday morning, telling Fox News that the Justice Department has not yet received a referral from the intelligence community, meaning “the process has not started yet.”
But the administration has not denied the existence of the order. While the administration defended its authority to seize phone records — and stressed that it does not monitor calls — one civil liberties group called this 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 report in the Guardian newspaper
The report in the Guardian newspaper follows revelations that the Justice Department was seizing the phone records of journalists, including at Fox News, in the course of leak probes.
The order, a copy of which apparently was obtained by The Guardian, reportedly was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19.
Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
It requires Verizon, one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.
The text of the order, as published by The Guardian, says that “the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the” the records in question.
