Thread: Why is the U.S. government seizing phone records of ALL verizon customers?

A real disgrace. Blame lies with the Patriot act.

Document reveals massive surveillance of U.S. citizens by NSA

WASHINGTON -- A leaked document lays bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records -- hundreds of millions of calls -- in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9-11 attacks.
At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists -- and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.
The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.
PHOTOS

Pedestrians pass a Verizon Wireless store on Canal Street in New York Thursday, June 6, 2013. The Obama administration has defended the government's need to collect telephone records of American citizens. (AP / John Minchillo)

Britain's Guardian newspaper says the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a secret court order. (AP / Amy Sancetta)
At a minimum, it's all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.
One outraged senator was Ron Wyden. He said, "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."
But Sen. Lindsay Graham said Americans have no cause for concern. "If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said.
At issue is a court order, first disclosed by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires Verizon to turn over, on an "ongoing, daily basis," records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said there was every reason to believe that similar orders were in place for other phone companies.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said the order was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice that is supervised by federal judges who balance efforts to protect the country from terror attacks against the need to safeguard Americans' privacy. The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9-11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.
While the scale of the program might not have been news to some congressional leaders, the disclosure offered a public glimpse into a program whose breadth is not widely understood. Sen. Mark Udall, who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said it was the type of surveillance that "I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it."
The public is now on notice that the government has been collecting data -- even if not listening to the conversations -- on every phone call every American makes, a program that has operated in the shadows for years, under President George W. Bush, and continued by President Barack Obama.
"It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records," wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.
Without confirming the authenticity of the court order, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said such surveillance powers are "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats," by helping officials determine if people in the U.S. who may have been engaged in terrorist activities have been in touch with other known or suspected terrorists.
Privacy advocates said the scope of the program was indefensible.
"This confirms our worst fears," said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "If the government can track who we call," he said, "the right to privacy has not just been compromised -- it has been defeated."
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was "extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation."
Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.
The Verizon order does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behaviour and identify "communities of interest" -- networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.
Verizon Executive Vice-President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company isn't allowed to comment on any such court order.
The company listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April -- 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines.
The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties -- and its commitment to accountability."
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Read more: Document reveals massive surveillance of U.S. citizens by NSA | CTV News

Read more: Document reveals massive surveillance of U.S. citizens by NSA | CTV News

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Originally Posted by Koojo

Why is the U.S. government seizing phone records of ALL verizon customers?

Because they can without appropriate rule of law or oversight. Patriot Act along with other powers given to spook agencies ensure individual privacy is a thing of the past. Anything said on the internet or via phone can and is being collected by various "security" agencies. Not to worry. It's a good thing. We need it to protect us from them nasty terrorists.

The National Security Agency: surveillance giant with eyes on America
The NSA is the best hidden of all the US intelligence services – and its secrecy has deepened as its reach has expanded

• Revealed: NSA taps into tech giants' systems to mine user data
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Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 23.55 BST
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One well-informed estimate suggests 100,000 people are employed at the National Security Agency. Photograph: Terry Ashe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The very existence of National Security Agency (NSA) was not revealed for more than two decades after its establishment in 1952, and even now its structure and activities remain largely unknown. Hence its wry nickname: No Such Agency.

Of all the US intelligence services, it is has been the best hidden, and has prided itself on having the fewest leaks – at least until now. How many people does it employ? That is classified. Just how many people does it target? The NSA tells members of Congress that it does not have the tools to provide such figures.

When Harry Truman set up the NSA, it was exclusively aimed at monitoring communications abroad. The question that had exercised politicians and civil rights organisations since the Senate unveiled it in 1975 is to what extent its ferocious appetite for data has encompassed American citizens. General Lou Allen, the first NSA chief to appear in public, told Congress in the mid-1970s that the agency maintained lists of hundreds of names, including US citizens under surveillance for anti-war dissent or suspicious foreign connections.

As technology has evolved, so has the NSA's capacity to intercept an astonishing variety and volume of communications. Satellites scoop up calls and emails in the ether and beam the information back to earthbound receiving stations. One estimate suggests that each of these bases hoovers up roughly one billion emails, phone calls and other forms of correspondence every day, and the agency has up to 20 bases.

"This is not science fiction. It is happening now," a source with knowledge of the NSA said.

Domestic snooping exploded in scale after 9/11, when George W Bush authorised the agency to eavesdrop on Americans without the previous requirement for warrants. Within a few months of taking office in 2009, the Obama administration's Justice Department conceded that the agency had been guilty of "over-collection" of domestic communications but claimed the excess had been accidental.

With every passing administration, the NSA has ballooned. One well-informed estimate of its staffing levels is 100,000, of whom about 30,000 are military and the rest private contractors. Its headquarters is a vast edifice of smoked glass in Fort Meade, in the leafy Washington suburbs, with sizeable complexes in Georgia and Texas and overseas bases in Japan, Germany and the UK.

While the NSA is by far the biggest surveillance agency in the world, it shares some of its work with four other allies: Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Collectively, they are known as the "five eyes". Of the five, the biggest after the NSA is Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The predecessor to the NSA was the short-lived Armed Forces Security Agency, which was set up in 1949. It was a relatively modest body compared with the mammoth the NSA has since become.

The young agency suffered some early embarrassments. In 1960, two of its staff defected to the Soviet Union. Three years later, a former NSA employee published code-breaking secrets in the Soviet paper Izvestia; the same year, an NSA employee killed himself while being investigated for selling secrets to Moscow.

Since then, internal security has been tightened significantly, but as the agency's secrecy deepened, its reach expanded relatively unchecked. It was a Democratic senator and lawyer, Frank Church, who in 1975 first raised the alarm at the agency's sprawling tentacles. During a series of hearings into the work of the intelligence agencies, he warned that the NSA's magnifying glass could be turned inwards on the American people.

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," he said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

The Church Senate hearings led to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), which required a warrant to conduct surveillance of communications within the US. A Fisa court, made up of a small group of judges appointed by the chief justice and located inside in the justice department, was given the job of deciding whether to grant warrants – it approves almost all requests.

In the years since 9/11, as the role of the NSA has snowballed, so has the debate over its operations. In 2005, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration had secretly authorised the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the US, to search for terrorist activity without the Fisa court warrants. The order had been signed in 2002, but the newspaper cited about a dozen serving or former officials who expressed concern about the legality. The Times delayed publication of the article for a year because of government concerns about its impact.

In the face of the subsequent uproar, the Bush administration said it had ceased the warrantless surveillance in January 2007 and resumed the practice of requiring NSA warrants. In 2008, Congress loosened some of those constraints in the Fisa Amendment Act.

The massive surveillance programme has continued under the Obama administration, at home as well as abroad. And the culture of intense secrecy persists. For years, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been demanding to know just how many people inside the US have been spied on by the NSA. No answer has been forthcoming.

The National Security Agency: surveillance giant with eyes on America | World news | guardian.co.uk

The abuses perpetrated under the Patriot Act in the name of "safety and security" are an affront to the US Constitution and threaten our most basic civil liberties.

"Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither." Benjamin Franklin

The United States used to be the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave". Now? Not so much...

It comes down to a choice between the protection or perceived protection from terrorism that comes with an increased level of intelligence on citizens versus the individual privacy we had before the patriot act.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Originally Posted by Koojo

Document reveals massive surveillance of U.S. citizens by NSA

Heh you whacked out conspiracy theorist -they would never do a thing like that. Source please.

Originally Posted by Koojo

this is the top of a slippery slope.

Mate, it's not the top, they're more than halfway down already and it's almost too late to slam the breaks on.

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

The abuses perpetrated under the Patriot Act in the name of "safety and security" are an affront to the US Constitution and threaten our most basic civil liberties.

... you forgot something tony....



They are all the same - Bush and Obama lol

Your best friend boontard supports this type of thing.

It's probably not a conspiracy - it is bureaucratic government justifying itself by expanded their domain endlessly. Creeping totalitarianism as seen in Europe especially, with bureaucrats thinking up new ways to look clever to their bosses and gain promotion, with no checks and balances to says "this is going too far". That, after all, is the politicians jobs. Alas though they are so busy taking handouts from Monsanto, the Banks, big oil etc and not least "other" interest groups, they let the countries go to hell.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

It's probably not a conspiracy - it is bureaucratic government justifying itself by expanded their domain endlessly. Creeping totalitarianism as seen in Europe especially, with bureaucrats thinking up new ways to look clever to their bosses and gain promotion, with no checks and balances to says "this is going too far". That, after all, is the politicians jobs. Alas though they are so busy taking handouts from Monsanto, the Banks, big oil etc and not least "other" interest groups, they let the countries go to hell.

^ You seem to forget that at the end of the day, elected officials do still answer to the electorate.


Oh wait, you don't vote; I guess this doesn't apply to you...

Tony =- the personal attack thread and funny political posters thread is somewhere else. You seem to be getting lost on trying to find it a lot recently. Third door on the left. Off you pop.

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

You seem to forget that at the end of the day, elected officials do still answer to the electorate.

Haven't noticed this is the case. Based on polls, elected officials answer to electorate by way of "promises" during election campaigns. Once elected promises are soon conveniently forgotten.

I wish you had not said that, Norton. We will now get bashed with a page or two of 'Yes We cans".

I can not understand how a bunch of million and billionaires can ever be said to represent the interests of the man in the street. Ever. So why do people vote for them?

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

You seem to forget that at the end of the day, elected officials do still answer to the electorate.

Haven't noticed this is the case. Based on polls, elected officials answer to electorate by way of "promises" during election campaigns. Once elected promises are soon conveniently forgotten.

Some seem to forget that politicians are elected to serve the people, not the other way around.



When a politician betrays that trust it's up to the electorate to make sure they are not re-elected.

Originally Posted by The Big Fella

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

You seem to forget that at the end of the day, elected officials do still answer to the electorate.

Haven't noticed this is the case. Based on polls, elected officials answer to electorate by way of "promises" during election campaigns. Once elected promises are soon conveniently forgotten.

Some seem to forget that politicians are elected to serve the people, not the other way around.



When a politician betrays that trust it's up to the electorate to make sure they are not re-elected.

In theory that is how democracy works. In principle though it doesn't actually work like that at all. Just look at the last election. BILLIONS of Dollars was spent by each candidate on their election campaigns and the American people were simply given the choice of whether to vote for Coke or Pepsi. it didn't really matter who won as they are simply puppets. Ask anyone how many people were running for the presidency and they would probably tell you just the two. I believe, I may be wrong on this that around 10 people were running but you only ever got to see or hear of the two. From a non American point of view the one person that actually had the interests of the American people first and foremost was Ron Paul and yet he was simply dismissed from the start.
Wall street now runs America and it is run for their benefit and not for the benefit of the American people like it once was decades ago.
Sadly like the UK I can't things changing in the near future as the money men are not going to let go of the power they hold easily.

So, your answer to the problem of corporate influence over politics is... give up?

Originally Posted by pseudolus

funny political posters thread is somewhere else.

The old rules are out the window and no one gives a shit about boontards political pic thread except him.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

It's probably not a conspiracy - it is bureaucratic government justifying itself by expanded their domain endlessly. Creeping totalitarianism as seen in Europe especially, with bureaucrats thinking up new ways to look clever to their bosses and gain promotion, with no checks and balances to says "this is going too far". That, after all, is the politicians jobs. Alas though they are so busy taking handouts from Monsanto, the Banks, big oil etc and not least "other" interest groups, they let the countries go to hell.

Can't tell for all of Europe, but telephone recording without consent of the parties is a crime in Germany, violation of confidentiality. The telephone of a suspected criminal or terrorist can be tapped by the authorities with approval of a judge, case by case.

Note that governments and authorities are shrinking in Europe too, smaller budgets, fewer personnel. Blanket surveillance can't be done without manpower.

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

So, your answer to the problem is... give up?

And yours is to pretend that everything is fine and the Dems really don't do what they do and Obama has not turned around and extended and expanded on the Bush policies that had good folks like yourself apoplectic just a few years ago?

How quickly we forget!

Originally Posted by The Big Fella

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

You seem to forget that at the end of the day, elected officials do still answer to the electorate.

Haven't noticed this is the case. Based on polls, elected officials answer to electorate by way of "promises" during election campaigns. Once elected promises are soon conveniently forgotten.

Some seem to forget that politicians are elected to serve the people, not the other way around.



When a politician betrays that trust it's up to the electorate to make sure they are not re-elected.

In theory that is how democracy works. In principle though it doesn't actually work like that at all. Just look at the last election. BILLIONS of Dollars was spent by each candidate on their election campaigns and the American people were simply given the choice of whether to vote for Coke or Pepsi. it didn't really matter who won as they are simply puppets. Ask anyone how many people were running for the presidency and they would probably tell you just the two. I believe, I may be wrong on this that around 10 people were running but you only ever got to see or hear of the two. From a non American point of view the one person that actually had the interests of the American people first and foremost was Ron Paul and yet he was simply dismissed from the start.
Wall street now runs America and it is run for their benefit and not for the benefit of the American people like it once was decades ago.
Sadly like the UK I can't things changing in the near future as the money men are not going to let go of the power they hold easily.

Couldn't agree more, and in my view, that's why America is doomed to bcome just another 2nd world nation with the rich elite being served by the masses and eventually a civil war, but a long period of south American country type circumstances. (Argentina, Chile) in between.

In Three Words:

Obama's Police State.

Welcome to the Brave New World.