Verizon Breaks Silence on Top-Secret Surveillance of Its Customers. Verizon responded to allegations that the telecom was served with a top-secret court order demanding it provide the FBI and the NSA with customer call records continuously, and in bulk, saying it respects “customers’ privacy” but must comply with the law.
The telecom’s comments came a day after the Guardian disclosed that a secretive U.S. court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, issued a sweeping order requiring Verizon Business Services — formerly MCI — to give the National Security Agency a feed of metadata on all calls within the United States and between the United States and foreign countries on an “ongoing, daily basis” for three months. Verizon declined to comment on the “accuracy” of the story, but noted that the order published by the Guardian “forbids Verizon from revealing the order’s existence.” “Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers’ privacy. “There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or novel.
Go Back to Top. Verizon forced to hand over telephone data – full court ruling. Forget phones, PRISM plan shows internet firms give NSA everything. It has been a rough 24 hours for the US National Security Agency.
First a leaked court order (and the political reaction) showed that the agency routinely harvests US mobile-use data, and now a new document has been uncovered that claims to show the larger internet companies do the same thing. A 41-page presentation, given in April this year and obtained by the Washington Post, details the PRISM project, a system described as being the largest single source of information for NSA analytic reports. PRISM apparently gives the NSA access to email, chat logs, any stored data, VoIP traffic, files transfers, social networking data, and the ominously named "Special Projects". Nine companies are currently part of PRISM. Microsoft was the first firm to sign up on Sept 11, 2007, with Yahoo! Apple held out for five years, but signed up in October last year, and video chat room provider PalTalk is also on board, with DropBox billed as coming soon.
NSA has been collecting records on every call made in America for the last seven years. Yesterday a leaked court order revealed that Verizon was compelled to turn over phone records to the National Security Agency, and tonight on the NBC Nightly News Andrea Mitchell reported that this was simply one part of a much broader program.
According to Mitchell, under the Patriot Act the US government has been collecting records on every telephone call made in the country for the last seven years. The "telephony metadata," as its referred to in the leaked Verizon court order, is stored on NSA computer systems. Names and recordings of the conversations themselves aren't included, though the government can opt to go back to the provider in question and ask permission to listen in on a given phone number should it believe a specific threat is likely. The Wall Street Journal corroborated the report, with its own sources confirming that AT&T and Sprint were both involved as well. Under the Patriot Act, the government stores a record of each phone call made in the US. Today NBC News tweeted that under the power granted by the Patriot Act, the United States government has collected a record on every phone call made in the United States. This goes far further than yesterday’s leak to the Guardian in which it was laid bare that Verizon was under a short term order to share call information from its network.
All calls, as allowed under the Patriot Act . The Patriot Act, as you certainly recall, was signed into law on October 26, 2001. As WolframAlpha notes, that’s 4,241 days ago . That’s a few phone calls, to put it lightly. On its nightly news broadcast, NBC played the following clip . The above news dovetails with today’s previous news of PRISM, a government program that, according to twin reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post , the government had access to servers and user information at a number of large, key Internet companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google . Top Image Credit: Zoe Rudisill.