US Targeting Phone Records of Millions of Americans EFE
go to original June 6, 2013

Members of Congress and The White House are defending a top secret NSA program that continues to collect data from millions of phone records, but civil liberties supporters remain skeptical. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima explains. (The Fold/The Washington Post)

The U.S. National Security Agency is receiving daily reports from telecoms giant Verizon detailing the call records of the company's millions of subscribers, The Guardian said.

The British newspaper obtained a copy of a top secret court order requiring Verizon to provide the data on an "ongoing, daily basis."

Obtained in April by the FBI, the order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pertains to all telephone calls in Verizon's networks, including those where both parties are inside the United States.

The authority to demand the call data lasts until July 19.

While the FBI sought and obtained the court order, the "telephony metadata" is delivered to NSA, which has the technology needed to process the massive volumes of information.

The metadata comprises the numbers of both parties on a call, their locations and the times and durations of all calls, though not the content of conversations.

"Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama," The Guardian said.

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