The National Security Agency is reportedly collecting telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, one of the largest telecom providers, on the orders issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, April 25.
The National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers in the U.S., according to a highly classified court order, which was revealed on Wednesday. According to a copy of the order document obtained by Britain's Guardian newspaper, the court grants unlimited access to the NSA of all telephone records from Verizon over a period of three months, which ends July 19. The order was signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
According to the Guardian, this is the first such order under the Obama administration to collect records of millions of U.S citizens. Previously, NSA had collected data including domestic telephone, Internet and email records authorized by George Bush during his presidency in October 2011. It created a chaos when the news was broken in 2006 by USA Today.
The order requires Verizon to give details of both the parties' numbers, location data, time and duration of all calls and unique identifiers. NSA will retrieve "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," according to the newspaper.
The exposure of the court of the government's surveillance act order has created further controversy. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, strongly opposes the act and says that it is "the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law" under Bush administration. "On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?" the Guardian quoted her saying.
The White House, Verizon and the NSA declined to comment on the order.
