NSA Monitoring Verizon Phone Records

This is an amazing story.  The NSA is collecting, analyzing and monitoring millions of Verizon phone records.

he US National Security Agency is collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, according to the Guardian newspaper.

The British paper published what it said was a secret court order directing the Verizon company to hand over electronic data on all its customers on an "ongoing daily basis".

Civil liberties groups said the details of the report were "stunning".

The US government and Verizon have not commented on the report.

The US Center for Constitutional Rights said it appears to be "the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued".

The document published by the Guardian was signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the secret Intelligence Surveillance Court on 25 April and lasts until 19 July.

The Guardian who originally broke the story details how the order gets around wiretapping laws:

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

Of course the National Security Agency has nothing on Walmart, Target, Amazon, Mastercard, Visa and the credit reporting bureaus profiling, tracking and knowing your every move.

meta: 

Comments

NSA must know all about banks aiding terrorists and cartels

NSA has authority to intercept outside US without any issues. So they knew full well when foreign offices or subsidiaries of US based banks were communicating with drug cartels and terrorists, Iran, etc. So the NSA wasn't upset with all of those intercepts when the DOJ said they get a free pass?
Wonder how many intercepts (actual phone conversations) they have of big banks communicating with overseas threats? Must be tens of thousands plus. And yet all this information being gathered on law-abiding US citizens, visitors, residents, etc. Odd, seems Orwellian. Has 1984 been banned yet or can I still check that out at a library? Will the FBI question who checks it out?

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that's the issue

Corporations already spy on us, ad nauseum. Fakebook, Google, Microsoft, Mastercard Visa, they are all spying on us daily, we have "targeted marketing" going on everywhere, profiling people.

Yet corporations just get ripped off by China, absolutely nothing happens to corporations committing crimes or aything else.

WaPo has the ISP list spying on us, but I'm sure this scratches the surface.

It's more the NSA is late to the party, no comparison to what Silicon valley knows about everyone.

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Ever wonder why they demand "online presence" for job hunt?

More information, the better they can screw everyone out there. All these shill articles and PR pieces that say Linkedin and Facebook are necessary serve the corporate masters and the govt. (that loves that Zuckerberg, Lindkedin, et al $).
Back in the day, companies had to wait to see how old you looked, color hair, attractive or unattractive, fat or too thin, acne or no, etc. Not like any of this crap matters in an objective skill-based world. But now these bastards demand in their shill pieces that everyone needs to post photos, needs to get on board with saying how great businesses are (notice how they say never comment negatively). Hey, with 22.5 million unemployed and America descending into a plutocratic Banana Republic, is it okay to voice an objection? Hell no, then they'll hold it against you. Never criticize the powers - that's not what they want.
How's free speech and democracy working out for us now? Obviously it's not, and these freaks demand that we not open our mouths lest Linkedin and Facebook deem us the scum of the Earth. Pure tripe. This is America.

1) "When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." Jefferson (you can substitute corporations for govt. because Jefferson knew the score on banks and big corps. too and knew what they were capable of).

2) "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Franklin.

Anyone out there still wonder why these people constantly bash liberal arts and anything beyond learning about being a cog? Knowing history, politics, world literature, use of propaganda, sociology, psychology, etc. might just get in the way of their plans. We can't be allowed to see what humans are capable of, that's not what they want or are doing now. Nope, they want cogs that fight for scraps and praise them everywhere on the Internet while doing it. And if you're too old or think too damn much, no job or food or home for you, now disappear and leave the powers to party and wipe their asses with our lives.

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well, "online presence"

can mean papers, code, presentations, articles, no photo involved.

That said, treating workers like crap seems to be the theme for the U.S. workforce across the board, with only the executive class being the exception.

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They'll find ways to use anything against people

They want to know what groups people belong to, what people read, associate with, etc. Any reason to screw 'em over before any interview is even granted. Same with all this "crowdsourcing and temp work are awesome! workers should love it!" nonsense. Crowdsourcing and temp work merely drive down wages and get big corporation the results of masses of people doing work for no benefits and one-off dismal payments. No benefits, low pay (if the people are even paid) and the big business gets the ideas for fractions of what R & D or full-time workers would cost. These issues, in a govt. that represented 99% of us, would have been stopped years ago, along with the other problems of invasions of privacy, labor arbitrage, abuse of internships for workers that aren't even in schools, etc. But they don't care, so at least we all need to be aware so we can see how were screwed over daily nonstop.

In corrupt countries, governments at least give the populations something in return for the corruption (e.g., bread + circuses). In really corrupt places, the people don't even get bread or circuses to go along with their loss of freedoms/privacy, poor job prospects, elite political class that acts like nobility and caters to a tiny elite here and abroad. Which one are we?

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data mining, profiling is big bucks

The profits being made off of profiling people is astounding, particularly astounding since there is no way profits from "consumers" can match the money being made by selling people's data and analyzing it.

1984 to be sure but this story to me isn't the real news, it is what corporations are being allowed to get away with in violating people's privacy.

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