According to a report in the Guardian newspaper, America’s National Security Agency (NSA) has been receiving information on a daily basis about all calls made by customers in the United States of Verizon Business Network Services, an arm of Verizon Communications, one of the country’s biggest telecom firms. A separate report, in the Washington Post, reveals that the NSA and FBI "are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time". Many of the firms mentioned in the latter report have denied involvement in the programme.
The Guardian report is based on a leaked court order that instructs Verizon Business Network Services to collect telephony “metadata” and to hand it over to the NSA. The information collected includes the phone numbers of callers and recipients, the unique identifier numbers of phones used on calls, and the time and duration of the conversations. The Post report describes a surveillance programme code-named Prism, which is meant to target foreigners but seems to collect a good deal of purely American content. The programme is said to be the most prolific contributor to the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
Although the order described by the Guardian, which was issued under the aegis of section 215 of the Patriot Act, doesn’t let the NSA see the content of individual calls, civil-liberties groups argue that by gathering metadata about them, intelligence agencies can use this to help build a detailed profile of callers using information from other sources, such as online social networks, that might fall under the Prism programme. It seems highly likely that other American telecoms companies—and other arms of Verizon—have received similar orders.
The top two leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, and Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia—portrayed the telecom surveillance as old news. "As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Ms Feinstein said. Mr Chambliss noted that "every member" of the Senate had been advised of the programme, and that no citizen had registered a complaint (though it's not clear how they would've known to). "It has proved meritorious", Mr Chambliss claimed, "because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."
Others are more concerned. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, has long complained that the government was not fully disclosing the extent of its snooping. He and Mark Udall, a Democratic senator from Colorado, have in the past accused the government of using "secret legal interpretations" to justify a surveillance programme that would leave Americans "stunned" were it made public. When previous changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were up for renewal last year, Mr Wyden introduced an amendment that would have required the government to disclose the number of American citizens caught up in its surveillance. It failed, but the law was renewed.
The new revelations will heap further pressure on the Obama administration, which recently came under fire when it emerged that the Justice Department had quietly obtained information on phone calls made by some reporters at the Associated Press, a news agency. One civil-liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long argued the government is involved in a “dragnet” approach to spying on Americans, has called for a “national dialogue about rights in the digital age”. The sooner this takes place the better.
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Source: economist.com
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