[Vision2020] Big Brother Lives

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 5, 2013
U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls By CHARLIE
SAVAGE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/charlie_savage/index.html>and
EDWARD
WYATT<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edward_wyatt/index.html>

WASHINGTON — 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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
according to a highly classified court
order<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/verizon_communications_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>subsidiary,
Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing
daily basis” to the National Security
Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>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.

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.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order>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,” said Marci Green Miller, a National Security
Agency spokeswoman, 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, that allows the
government to secretly obtain “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 Mark Udall of Colorado, 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<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/325953-85512347-senators-ron-wyden-mark-udall-letter-to.html>.


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<http://www.justice.gov/nsd/opa/pr/testimony/2011/nsd-testimony-110309.html>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<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/politics/justice-dept-is-accused-of-misleading-public-on-patriot-act.html>.
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<http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Secret-law-FOIA-complaint.pdf>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.
  --
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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