NSA’s Verizon Spying Order Specifically Targeted Americans, Not Foreigners
The National Security Agency has long justified its spying powers by arguing that its charter allows surveillance on those outside of the United States, while avoiding intrusions into the private communications of American citizens. But the latest revelation of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance shows that it has focused specifically on Americans, to the degree that its data collection has in at least one major spying incident explicitly excluded those outside the United States.
In a top secret order obtained by the Guardian newspaper and published Wednesday evening, the FBI on the NSA’s behalf demanded that Verizon turn over all metadata for phone records originating in the United States for the three months beginning in late April and ending on the 19th of July. That metadata includes all so-called “non-content” data for millions of American customers’ phone calls, such as the subscriber data, recipients, locations, times and durations of every call made during that period.
Aside from the sheer scope of that surveillance order, reminiscent of the warrantless wiretapping scandal under the Bush administration, the other shocking aspect of the order its target: The order specifically states that only data regarding calls originating in America are to be handed over, not those between foreigners.
This can’t be a surprise to anybody. Spying on internal subjects in the US is something that has been done since 9/11 and with the Boston bombings, spying just increased – everything you do is being monitored and soon, every corner will have CCTVs – if you are doing nothing wrong, you won’t be affected by it. The Land of Free?? My arse!!!
Spying on internal subjects has been done since way before 911.
I disagree with the NSA having access to phone records, but if they want to analyse the call patterns between me, my wife, and my moron friends and family, more power to them. I’m more irritated that I pay them to do it than I am with the invasion of my privacy.
But we’re all cool with DNA swabs during booking… correct?