As you’ve likely seen, The Guardian reported Wednesday night that the National Security Agency got a court order in April to demand the call records of all Verizon Business Network Services. The order doesn’t allow the NSA to listen in on the calls, but it covers information on call time, duration, location, and other details. The paper obtained the order itself.
The order appears to go beyond what Congress authorized the Bush administration to do in 2008, when it expanded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with support from then Sen. Obama. That expansion didn’t cover calls in which both parties were in the U.S. The recent court order does. It calls for the production of “telephony metadata” on communications both “between the United States and abroad” and “wholly within the United States, including local calls.”
The order relies on a provision of the Patriot Act that, as The New York Times reports, “made it easier to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records so long as they were merely deemed ‘relevant’ to a national-security investigation.”
“It lets the government keep a record of anyone you call, anyone who calls you, for how long you talk, potentially from where you’re talking,” Alex Abdo, an attorney with the ACLU’s national security project, explained to me. “That is a stone’s throw away from an Orwellian state.”
Abdo said what’s also troubling about the news is that it could represent just “the tip of the iceberg,” as he put it:









