NSA’s Secret Verizon Data-Mining Operation Exposed
Under highly classified orders from a secret court, Verizon has been passing on the phone call records of every single one of its customers to the US National Security Agency (NSA), UK newspaper The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
Several weeks ago the court order, which was issued by an unknown federal court, granted the NSA a three-month window during which Verizon is compelled to hand over daily logs of all its customer’s calls when either one or both parties are located in the United States.
Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Guardian, adds that this window is still open:
“The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.”
“Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.”
To prove its claims, The Guardian published a copy of the court order, dated last April and signed by Judge Roger Vinson. The document was subsequently shown to a number of experts by the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, who agreed that the document looks to be authentic.
Nakashima writes that:
“The (Guardian) website reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic. … An expert in this aspect of the law said Wednesday night that the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.”
The Guardian’s Greenwald notes in his own report that the “unlimited nature of the records is extremely unusual”, with FISA court orders normally being directed at specific individuals who are suspected of either having links to terrorist groups or being involved in spying.
What’s more, the Verizon order may just be the tip of the iceberg. The Guardian says that while it doesn’t have proof of any other networks being targeted by the NSA, “previous reporting suggests that the NSA has collected cell phone records from all major mobile networks”.
It’s All About The Metadata, But What Does That Reveal?
So you’re probably wondering just what data is the NSA getting its hands on? Thankfully, the court order doesn’t allow the NSA to spy on your phone calls, or even to obtain the names and addresses of anyone making calls.
Instead, the order specifically relates to phone call “metadata”, which includes the cell phone number of each recipient, each phone’s unique serial number, the time and duration of each call, and the location of the caller and receiver.
In a separate article, The Guardian’s James Ball states that the government has long argued that this metadata doesn’t actually amount to private or personal information. Instead, they compare it to looking at the envelope of a letter – the receiver’s and sometimes the sender’s address is essentially public knowledge, and therefore, hoarding this information is not an invasion of privacy.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s pretty easy to use the available metadata to build up an extremely accurate picture of the person behind each phone. By obtaining the actual phone numbers of each caller, an organization like the NSA should easily be able to put a name to that phone. Moreover, by knowing each caller and the individuals they speak to, when and for how long, it shouldn’t be difficult to ascertain who someone’s associates are, where they spend most of their time, and predict their daily movements.
The issue of how intrusive phone call metadata can be is actually the subject of intensive debate at the moment, and has even been discussed in the appellate courts. In one example cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an appellate court acknowledged that such data could reveal all kinds of secrets about an individual:
“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups. And not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
Which leads us to the next question – what does the NSA want with all that metadata?
According to The Guardian, the NSA’s primary purpose is to carry out data-mining, using various number-crunching algorithms to try and highlight unusual patterns among caller’s phone records that might suggest some kind of terrorist plot or criminal conspiracy. Fair enough – but the chances are that a lot of these “patterns” they identify are likely to be totally innocent – someone who frequently calls Afghanistan and Pakistan is likely to draw attention, and as a result the NSA will go snooping further into that person’s activities, when in all likelihood he or she has no connection to terrorism whatsoever.
The other problems that will concern privacy advocates is that now it’s obtained this data, the NSA is going to hoard it forever. This means that it’ll be able to go back and look at its records at any time an individual comes to its attention – easy and retroactive surveillance that’ll help it to learn about your movements, social networking and more, over a period of several years.
Is It Legal?
Aside from the sinister snooping aspect of this, there are also questions about the legality of the order. According to The Guardian, the order falls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to make broad demands of carriers to secure information about calls.
However, as Forbes’ Andy Greenberg notes, while the classified order apparently comes from the FBI, it clearly states that the data is to be passed onto the NSA, which is actually tasked with spying on foreign threats, not domestic ones. In fact, the NSA’s charter specifically disavows it from carrying out surveillance of people within the United States – something that conveniently seems to have been forgotten.
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