The National Security Agency is sweeping up data every day on a vast number of telephone calls by Americans, both within the U.S. and with callers overseas, according to a classified federal court order published Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The White House declined to comment on the report and referred questions to the FBI and NSA, which offered no further details in response to queries Wednesday night.
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Several news outlets reported in 2006 that the Bush administration was compiling massive database of Americans’ long-distance and international calls. Some telecom companies denied they were taking part in the program, but Bush administration officials never denied the broad outlines of the story. Some officials pointed to court rulings saying Americans had no privacy interest in information such as the numbers dialed on a phone.
It had not previously been confirmed that the Obama administration was conducting similar broad surveillance of calling patterns. However, in 2008, Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to give explicit legal authority to aspects of the program President George W. Bush initiated without requiring a future blessing from lawmakers.
Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama opposed the legislation during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton. However, he reversed course shortly after clinching the nomination and voted for a modified version of the bill.
Some lawmakers — including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who both serve on the Intelligence Committee — have long contended that the federal government is using orders from the FISA court to engage in surveillance that would shock and anger many Americans.
The Guardian noted in its report that it was unclear whether the order represented a one-time occurrence, or merely a routine renewal of an existing request.
In a Senate floor speech in December, Wyden hinted at classified information he had received but could not share due to Senate rules that indicated the law “on Americans’ privacy has been real, and it is not hypothetical.”
“When the public finds out that these secret interpretations are so dramatically different than what the public law says, I think there’s going to be extraordinary anger in the country,” he told the Huffington Post the following month.
On Wednesday, Udall reiterated his discomfort with the FISA court’s activities.
“While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of wide-scale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I’ve said Americans would find shocking,” Udall told POLITICO. “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.”
Both Wyden and Udall have repeatedly pressed the executive branch to be more forthcoming about how the law is being used. The senators indicated that one of their concerns was the specific legal provision used to obtain the Verizon order.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/report-nsa-verizon-call-records-92315.html#ixzz2VQYUN723
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