A senior Obama administration official said on Thursday morning that a
court order seeking the business records of Verizon customers, disclosed
by the newspaper The Guardian, “does not allow the government to listen
in on anyone’s telephone calls” and “does not include the content of
any communications or the name of any subscriber,” but rather “relates
exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of the
call.”
The official emphasized that “all three branches of government are
involved in reviewing and authorizing” any domestic intelligence
collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that any
surveillance activities under it are overseen by the Justice
Department, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the
FISA Court “to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and laws
of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil
liberties.”
“Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a
critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the
United States,” the official said, “as it allows counterterrorism
personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in
contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities,
particularly people located inside the United States.”
The order, signed in April by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, 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.”
The order does not apply to the content of the communications.
Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who has raised warnings about
sweeping federal surveillance, suggested on Thursday that the program
represented excessive action by the government.
“While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this
sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind
of government overreach I’ve said Americans would find shocking,” Mr.
Udall said. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it’s why I
will keep fighting for transparency and appropriate checks on the
surveillance of Americans.”
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.
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.
“We will respond as soon as we can,” Marci Green Miller, a National
Security Agency spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security
purposes, including “tangible things” like a business’s customer
records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act,
which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The order was marked “TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN,” referring to
communications-related intelligence information that may not be released
to noncitizens. That would make it among the most closely held secrets
in the federal government, and its disclosure comes amid a furor over
the Obama administration’s aggressive tactics in its investigations of
leaks.
The collection of call logs is set to expire in July unless the court extends it.
The collection of communications logs — or calling “metadata” — is
believed to be a major component of the Bush administration’s program of
surveillance that took place without court orders. The newly disclosed
order raised the question of whether the government continued that type
of information collection by bringing it under the Patriot Act.
The disclosure late Wednesday seemed likely to inspire further
controversy over the scope of government surveillance. Kate Martin of
the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy
group, said that “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this
looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped
Americans in clear violation of the law” under the Bush administration.
“On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it
believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?” she said.
For several years, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Udall, have been cryptically
warning that the government was interpreting its surveillance powers
under that section of the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming to
the public if it knew about it.
“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how
these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot
Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
They added: “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what
most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly
claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to
have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the
public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”
A spokesman for Senator Wyden did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the Verizon order.
The senators were angry because the Obama administration described Section 215
orders as being similar to a grand jury subpoena for obtaining business
records, like a suspect’s hotel or credit card records, in the course
of an ordinary criminal investigation. The senators said the secret
interpretation of the law was nothing like that.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act made it easier to get an order from the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records so
long as they were merely deemed “relevant” to a national-security
investigation.
The Justice Department has denied being misleading about the Patriot Act.
Department officials have acknowledged since 2009 that a secret,
sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and have insisted
that their statements about the matter have been accurate.
The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2011
for a report describing the government’s interpretation of its
surveillance powers under the Patriot Act. But the Obama administration
withheld the report, and a judge dismissed the case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&smid=go-share
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