Verizon giving data on all calls (foreign and domestic) to NSA?

[cwillour]

I did a search for Verizon and did not see another posting, so sorry if this is a dupe:

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian

Report: NSA Was Granted Order to Snag Millions of Verizon Call Records for 3 Months | Threat Level | Wired.com

Report: Court order forces Verizon to turn over records of millions - CNN.com

I wonder if this puppy will have legs or just fizzle as .gov refuses to address concerns due to "national security" interests. Also, how could any court consider such a wide-ranging order as a reasonable exception to 4A rights?

 

[BigMatt]

I heard this on NPR this morning and was shocked at how they portrayed it. One question from the news reader to the commentator was "Is this legal?" and the commentator said "Well, a judge ordered it, so it is legal" and that is all that was said about the legality of it.

 

[armedindy]

sounds like its legal under the patriot act

 

[KLB]

This goes back to the "Patriot Act" apparently. It will not surprise me to learn it is happening on all the carriers.

 

[BigMatt]

sounds like its legal under the patriot act

That is another thing they glossed over on that NPR segment. Apparently, there are some secret internal opinions of the powers that the "Patriot Act" grants. This is scary.

This is about internet privacy, but I am sure there are secret opinions on phone records too.

Government Confirms That It Has Secret Interpretation of Patriot Act Spy Powers | American Civil Liberties Union

 

[dirtfarmerz]

Bush collected the data on U.S. calls to overseas suspected terrorist locations. Obama is using it to collect data on domestic calls. If the war on terror is over, why is he collecting data on domestic calls. It is probably because of the DHS terrorist watch list. Evangelical Christians were #1 on that list and Al Qaeda was #6. How can we trust a government that thinks like this? I posted the link about a week ago. Obama is developing his domestic force that is equal to our military. He's using the DHS, IRS, USDA, NSA, ATF, EPA, and probably more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B19PDXL2csw&feature=related

"They" have passed laws and orders that appear to be necessary for the targeted problem, but they can all be expanded to achieve their purpose.

 

[JetGirl]

Well, duh.
How is the IRS gonna find out who to target next if they can't spy and eavesdrop on citizens?

 

[smokingman]

I would be shocked if it was just one carrier.People need to wake up.

 

[Designer99]

Bush collected the data on U.S. calls to overseas suspected terrorist locations. Obama is using it to collect data on domestic calls.

Not quite.

"The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans"

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian

 

[dirtfarmerz]

Not quite.

"The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans"

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian

I should have read the entire article. This morning on Fox & Friends Michelle Malkin mentioned that Bush targeted U.S. to overseas phone calls. There was no mention of collecting data on U.S. citizens. It just makes sense, Obama blasted everything that Bush was doing, but after he was elected, he continued and increased a lot of the practices that he was supposedly against.

 

[tatertot]

I would be shocked if it was just one carrier.People need to wake up.

This. My first reaction was to switch carriers. I am pretty confident all carriers are in on this.

 

[smokingman]

Just wait until the data centers are up an running.The one in Utah is the largest(due to be finished in September 2013).Nothing is private any more.Nothing.

“We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013 | Zero Hedge

Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

 

[jwh20]

Everyone knows that would-be terrorists only use Verizon. AT&T coverage is so spotty that they can't rely on it...

If you're not outraged at this, you should be. If you've not contacted your legislators about it, you need to do it today.

This is nothing but wholesale "trolling" of phone records looking for data. But it's being done without any probable cause or warrant. If this is legal under the Patriot Act, and I don't believe it is, then the act needs to be repealed or changed.

Of course this should not be surprising in light of the other activities of the Obama Administration that have been revealed recently.

You might say, "I've got nothing to hide, I'm not a terrorist." Ok, but do you believe the government has the right to monitor where you go (via the GPS and/or cell tower location from your cell calls) and who you talk to? What if you were implicated as a suspect in a crime simply because you were in the area making a phone call near where it happened? Yes, this information could be extracted from the data they are collecting.

 

[japartridge]

What the hell is wrong with the rest of the citizens of this country?? It is past time to wake up, we wait much longer we won't have any ****ing country left to save!!!! This is tyranny plain and simple, if anyone can't see that, then maybe they should be removed from this country!

 

[mrjarrell]

 

[cwillour]

This is nothing but wholesale "trolling" of phone records looking for data. But it's being done without any probable cause or warrant. If this is legal under the Patriot Act, and I don't believe it is, then the act needs to be repealed or changed.

I believe more than one article has stated that the information gathering was authorized by the FISA court. IMO, this implies that they were able to obtain a warrant for the data. I would really like to see the justification for such a broad-reaching warrant, however.

Personally, I do not care what the Patriot Act says. If a law is passed that permits government actions that violate constitutional protections, then that portion of the law is unconstitutional and the actions remain forbidden.

IMO, for anybody in the employ of the government to reasonably know an action violates the Constitution and yet execute or order the action anyway under cover of a "Law" is similar to the worst kinds of "just following orders" defenses. Attorneys, government legal consoles, agents, and especially appointees should be prosecuted for there roles in encouraging/conducting/permitting such infringements. To take it a step further, attempts by an administration to pardon offenders that were appointees should be considered an act of "aiding and abetting after the fact" and be grounds for impeachment.

 

[rambone]

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order: Verizon forced to hand over telephone data

 

[Ben Nelson]

Yet another example illustrating that the federal government is not our friend...

 

[HeadlessRoland]

This has been going on for more than twelve years (post 9-11). Why are people just now realizing this? It's not just data. It's EVERYTHING online: Facebook posts, twitter feeds, email, blogs, forums, cell phone calls, SMS messages, iMessages... everything.

Emails older than 180 days don't even have privacy safeguards under the 1986 public law.

Stellar Wind and Carnivore have been live for ages, and the NSA isn't nearly done yet. Now it's time to make the surveillance real-time and all-encompassing via the use of drones. Phase out landline phones that are harder to tap, move everyone over to ubiquitous cell phones that can be triangulated within minutes, implement wifi technology via the 802.11 protocol and build in backdoors for government as required by public law, create a foreign intelligence surveillance court for imminent-need warrants, make thy court internal and toss away the purpose of even that charade by misinterpreting legality as legitimacy and just tossing away the Constitutional need for warrants by claiming that America is part of a battlefield in some abstract war on Fear, since apparently we can now bomb and destroy intangible things.

All of this is just a pretext for hyper-globalistic tyranny presented as "free trade" and "international law" and "economic equality" and "social justice" when in reality it's just another desperate attempt by the parasitic supra-powerful to extract as much wealth and value from the masses as possible.

And I'm not talking about being upset by the wealthy. I'd love to be as wealthy as Bill Gates and I admire him for building his empire. This is about the trillionaires. The names you've never heard of. The report writers of UN Agenda 21. Those with true plans. They've been insidiously working toward this goal for ages and the plan nears closer and closer to fruition: billions defenseless and made to serve and sacrifice for them. Name a few trillionaires. You can't. We don't know who they are.

 

[HeadlessRoland]

I believe more than one article has stated that the information gathering was authorized by the FISA court. IMO, this implies that they were able to obtain a warrant for the data. I would really like to see the justification for such a broad-reaching warrant, however.

Personally, I do not care what the Patriot Act says. If a law is passed that permits government actions that violate constitutional protections, then that portion of the law is unconstitutional and the actions remain forbidden.

IMO, for anybody in the employ of the government to reasonably know an action violates the Constitution and yet execute or order the action anyway under cover of a "Law" is similar to the worst kinds of "just following orders" defenses. Attorneys, government legal consoles, agents, and especially appointees should be prosecuted for there roles in encouraging/conducting/permitting such infringements. To take it a step further, attempts by an administration to pardon offenders that were appointees should be considered an act of "aiding and abetting after the fact" and be grounds for impeachment.

If you'll notice, the term "legal" has been quietly replaced with the word "lawful" more and more. The word legal implies legitimacy, legality. Lawful simply means in accordance with a law without speaking as to the legitimacy of that law. John Yoo is pretty much famous for this. 'Meh, it might not be legal (meaning legitimate under the corpus of our founding document and system of law), but Congress passed this startle bill we put on their desks at 4 a.m., so it's completely lawful.' These are the sorts of mental gymnastics and tortuous abuse of semantics at work here.

I forget the originator of this quote at the moment, but not a day goes by that I don't spontaneously think of it: "It is dangerous to be right when Government is wrong."