Report: NSA collecting phone records of Verizon customers.
A British newspaper reported that the National Security Agency is gathering telephone records from millions of Verizon customers under a top-secret court order.WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency currently is collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, Britain's Guardian newspaper said.
The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper said Wednesday. The order 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 United States and between the United States 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 were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.
The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.
Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday that the company had no comment. The White House declined comment and referred questions to the NSA. The NSA had no immediate comment.
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 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 Sept. 11 attacks was controversial.
The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled 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 Guardian said.
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.
