The NSA has been collecting detailed call records from America's three largest telecommunications providers since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials with direct knowledge of the arrangement told Leslie Cauley of USA Today.
Until last week, in part because of official denials, most people had no idea that the U.S. government was collecting any domestic phone records.
Then NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems.
The document is the first concrete corroboration of claims that the NSA had requested call data from major telecom providers.
The leak corroborates a 2006 report by Leslie Cauley of the USA Today that AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon have all been handing over massive, detailed, domestic call records since shortly after 9/11.
The NSA's goal with this program is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, an unnamed official told USA Today.
The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists for "social network analysis," one official said, which is used to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.
USA Today's Cauley noted that usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is questionable and may be illegal.
Is this legal?
Historically, a court order has been required by phone companies before they would consider turning over a customer's calling data.
Cauley noted that under section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding whom a customer calls, how often, and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination.
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the government in light of Snowden's Verizon leak.
Officials subsequently argued that Section 215 of the Patriot Act justifies the collection of “metadata” about every phone call made or received by U.S. residents.
The ACLU suit counters that this type of dragnet surveillance "is not authorized by Section 215 and violates the First and Fourth Amendments," noting that such information "gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations."
Adding to the ACLU's concerns are indications that the NSA database of communications may have been used for other purposes besides counterterrorism.
NSA Whistleblower William Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — contends that the NSA began using the program he built (i.e. ThinThread) to identify, in real time, networks of associations between people.
The aim, Binney says, is to use communications data — including metadata from phone calls — to build profiles of nearly all Americans so that the government is "able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
It should be noted that as of 2008 FISA amendment, the government has provided "retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that assisted the Bush administration in its warrantless wiretapping program."
Beyond phone calls?
The three carriers cooperating with the NSA provide services including wireless and high-speed broadband Internet, and whistleblowers have asserted that the NSA has access to Internet traffic as well.
In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin of The Washington Post reported that "collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications" every day.
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake maintains that the agency is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
Between 2002 and 2004 AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered a wiretapped room where he said the NSA "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T," emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
In 2007 a former Verizon consultant alleged that Verizon built a fiber optic cable to provide the government access to "all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center."
The NSA, the world's largest spy agency, said in 2001 that it wanted to "live on the network" to deal with the volumes of data on the Internet.
Today the agency is considered expert in the practice of "data mining," i.e. sifting through reams of information in search of patterns.
CIA Chief Technology Officer Ira "Gus" Hunt indirectly corroborated the whistleblower claims in March when he told a tech conference: "Since you can't connect dots you don't have ... we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.""It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,"Hunt said.
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