Community Corner

Report: NSA Collecting Call Records of ALL Verizon Customers

Leaked top secret court order reportedly shows Verizon required to hand over telephone records of millions of Americans.

Customers of a major U.S. telecommunication provider have unknowingly been subjected to a top secret court order requiring details of their call activity to be handed over to the National Security Agency (NSA), according to a Guardian report.

On April 25, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) reportedly granted the NSA authority to obtain information on all telephone calls made within the Verizon system -- regardless of whether or not the customer was believed to have been engaged in any illicit activity.

Are you a Verizon customer? Do you feel your call data should be handed over to the NSA for analysis? Let us know in the comments or post a blog.

The order covers various identifying information including the numbers of both parties involved in the call, the duration of the call, the location of the call and other network data. The order extends until July 19.

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Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told the Washington Post, "This confirms what we had long suspected. We’ve been suing over this since 2006.”

Cohn maintains the order exceeds even the authority granted by the Patriot Act in that it targets millions of customers with no alleged ties to terrorist activity.

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At issue is section 215 of the Patriot Act which grants government agencies wide latitude in seeking secret court orders in connection with terrorism or foreign intelligence investigations.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder dated March 15, 2012, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden wrote, "We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

According to Wired, "the dragnet collection of data would allow the government to build a massive database of transactional records to map connections and relationships between callers."

This data mapping has been an issue of concern for years. In 2006, USA Today reported the NSA had been secretly collecting records of millions of Americans using data from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

"The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans -- most of whom aren't suspected of any crime," the USA Today report stated. "This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement on June 5 calling the use of the Patriot Act in such a way "alarming."

"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," said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. "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."

"We decline comment," Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman, told the Washington Post.

Fox News reports a senior White House administration official would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the secret order.

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