SurveillanceNSA collecting information on Verizon customers’ communications
The National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting massive amounts of “metadata,” or transactional information, on millions of Verizon’s U.S. customers. A court granted the NSA permission to begin information collection on 25 April, stipulating the collection must end by 19 July. The court order instructs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order.” It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information,” such as “originating and terminating number,” the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information.”
In a news story it broke yesterday, the Guardian reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting massive amounts of “metadata,” or transactional information, on millions of Verizon’s U.S. customers. A court granted the NSA permission to begin information collection on 25 April, stipulating the collection must end by 19 July.
Details of the judge’s order show that the NSA is engaging – or re-engaging – in a form of data-mining which the George W. Bush administration launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
President Bush, on 4 October 2001, authorized the implementation of a bulk information collection program of domestic telephone, Internet, and e-mail records.
The secret program came to light in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth,” and was “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.”
It has been assumed that following these revelations, the information collection program, in the way it was practiced between 2001 and 2006, was terminated.
The story about the NSA and Verizon is the first time that the NSA under Obama has been revealed to follow similar practices to those it did from 2001 to 2006.
The judge’s order
Judge Roger Vinson, who serves on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), on 25 April granted the FBI, acting on behalf of the National Security Agency (NSA), unlimited authority to obtain from Verizon 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 judge allowed the FBI unlimited access to the data for a period of three months, which ends on 19 July.
The “business records” order, issued by the FISA Court, does not require a showing of probable cause to believe that the targets are agents of a foreign power. Rather, all that is required is a showing that “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that the tangible things sought are “relevant to an authorized investigation . . .to obtain foreign intelligence information . . . or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
The Washington Post reports that the document published by the Guardian appears to represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued.
