◼ Obama's NSA collecting phone records of millions daily - CHARLIE SAVAGE and EDWARD WYATT/New York Times (◼ New York Times quietly changes published editorial to make it less damning of Obama - Daily Caller)
The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cellphone services, or to other telecommunications carriers. The order prohibits its recipient from discussing its existence, and representatives of both Verizon and AT&T declined to comment Wednesday evening.
The four-page order was disclosed Wednesday evening by the newspaper The Guardian. Obama administration officials at the F.B.I. and the White House also declined to comment on it Wednesday evening, but did not deny the report, and a person familiar with the order confirmed its authenticity.
◼ Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over 'telephony metadata' - AP
◼ WH defends, says 'critical tool' against terrorist threats - Reuters (image source)
The Obama administration on Thursday acknowledged that it is collecting a massive amount of telephone records from at least one carrier, reopening the debate over privacy even as it defended the practice as necessary to protect Americans against attack.
The admission comes after the Guardian newspaper published a secret court order related to the records of millions of Verizon Communications customers on its website on Wednesday.
◼ Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners - Forbes
Though the classified, top secret order comes from the FBI, it clearly states that the data is to be given to the NSA. That means the leaked document may serve as one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that the NSA’s spying goes beyond foreigners to include Americans, despite its charter specifically disallowing surveillance of those within the United States.
“In many ways it’s even more troubling than [Bush era] warrantless wiretapping, in part because the program is purely domestic,” says Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.”But this is also an indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”
◼ NSA downloading 1.7 billion bits of info from internet every day...
◼ The court order alone probably doesn’t merit the ACLU’s charge that it was “beyond Orwellian”—though it’s no small irony that “1984” was published 64 years ago today. - National Journal
Six other questions remain.
Were other communications companies other than Verizon involved?(◼ New York Times quietly changes published editorial to make it less damning of Obama - Daily Caller)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has reason to believe AT&T may also have been complicit, citing evidence that one of its technicians installed hardware designed to copy and forward Internet traffic to the NSA.If the NSA has access to phone records, why the need to subpoena the AP’s logs?
Does “telephony metadata” cover more than just phone calls?...
As Marc Ambinder points out, if the NSA is already collecting metadata, why should the government need to subpoena said information to go after whistleblowers? In principle, barriers exist between the NSA (Pentagon) and the FBI (Justice Department) to prevent this sort of thing....What does this mean for Eric Holder and James Comey?
Attorney General Holder goes to Capitol Hill later this morning to face lawmakers’ questions again. The scheduled appearance just got a lot more interesting. Comey, Obama’s pick for FBI director, famously opposed the warrantless wiretapping program under President George W. Bush. But it’s not clear whether this current form of domestic surveillance, one that involves a court order, is something he would support. Comey’s confirmation hearing just a lot more interesting, too.What does this mean for the future of cybersecurity legislation?
...The White House has opposed the House cybersecurity bill , CISPA, on privacy grounds. But if the NSA court order is true, what the public thought was a principled stand by the president might turn out to be a matter of political expediency after all.How hard will Obama go after his latest whistleblower?
The New York Times edited its damning editorial condemning the Obama administration for collecting phone call data from Americans to make it less stinging shortly after the editorial was published online Thursday afternoon.
The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.
But hours later the stinging sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.”
◼ Mark Levin On NSA Tracking: "We Have The Elements Of A Police State Here" - Real Clear Politics
Related:
◼ DHS: Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches - CBS DC
◼ FBI 'WANTS BACK DOOR TO ALL SOFTWARE' - WND
ALGORE: 'Obscenely outrageous?'
