The order in a nutshell:<p>IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: <i>all call detail records</i> or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the <i>United States and abroad</i>; or (ii) wholly within the United States, <i>including local telephone calls</i>.<p>-<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...</a><p>It was approved (reapproved?) on April 25, and valid until mid July, and scheduled for declassification in (oops!) 2038. Interesting to note that this order was directed at Verizon, but presumably other carriers have received similar ones?
Now that we know that <i>every</i> call is being slurped up by the surveillance-monster, people can no longer bury their heads in the "but they're only snooping on the 'bad guys'" sand. Maybe — though doubtfully — <i>that</i> will finally raise some broader public ire.<p>EDIT: phrasing.
The NSA collecting call-detail records en masse is not news, and goes back to at least 2006. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database</a><p>The news is that the Guardian has got a copy of an actual court order, so we can see the exact language used with the phone companies.
Its nice to finally see a glenn greenwald article on the front page for once. I have been reading him every day for years and i would highly recommend his entire body of work to anyone who is not familiar with it.
Someone needs to find a way to make end to end encryption of phone calls a reality.<p>I can think of technical solutions but it's another matter to get adoption. Also it can't only be an app. The phone can not be trusted. I think you'd need a small device that connects via wifi to your phone and then run some encryption over the top of that. It could be very small with only speaker and mic capabilities. Then you'd have an app on your phone to initial calls and display incoming calls.
I hope that anyone in the US who is outraged realizes that the only real chance for change on this topic is in electing like-minded representatives to Congress, and getting everyone you know to vote the same way. Your current senator or representative likely supports this sort of action already, and it's not a violation of current law.<p>It's not a party issue but rather a power issue, institutions that have it won't give it up on their own.
This is why I believe we need simple, widespread encryption that is enabled by default. There are many applications which offer strong guarantees, such as Silent Circle (for whom I work), RedPhone, and even iMessage is pretty secure, from what I gather.<p>Many chat clients have OTR support, SIP has ZRTP, etc. There are alternatives, unfortunately the really popular methods don't make security a priority.
I'm actually surprised that it's only metadata and not a complete capture of the contents.<p>Or will we learn later that there's another more secret order for that?
Thats hardly surprising, it is widely known or at least suspected that the NSA collects and stores all telephone communications, and not just metadata but the actual content as well. The capabilities of known and unknown US intelligence agencies are a state secret and the public will never know anything for sure.<p>This gives you an insight over what the public <i>thinks</i> to know so far: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...</a>
The NSA stopped caring about your privacy after 9/11 — just read about the demise of project ThinThread [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread</a>
Direct PDF link: <a href="http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/709012/verizon.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/709012/verizon.pdf</a>
Everyone should realize one thing that makes this news slightly less scary, but still scary nonetheless: the order only applies to "Verizon Business Network Services", which is not the entirety of Verizon Communications.<p>While this still means that the metadata from millions of phone calls by random people, possibly from phones not even on Verizon who were simply calling VBNS phones, have been vacuumed up by the government, it also means that not "all" Verizon phones are meta-tapped as the article seems to insinuate (tagline, picture caption).<p>Glenn has done incredible commentary and reporting for many, many years; I hope this story will be only the beginning of his contributions and shake-ups to the discourse and activism against the U.S. surveillance oligarchy. Anyone who hasn't been reading his pieces whenever they come out are missing a phenomenon in human history.
The document included applies to "MCI Communications, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business Network Services,"<p>My Verizon iPhone is with "Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless," a separate legal entity.<p>Do we know that this order actually applies to individuals' phone calls? It seems the document would only apply to enterprise customers.
Glenn Greenwald also commented on the article in a reply to a comment requesting "the other side" view :<p>GlennGreenwald:<p>@strangemartin > Can't help feeling I'm only getting one side of the story here.<p>There's probably another court order that I've decided to hide from you that reads: "About that last order: just kidding. The government is only entitled to get the phone records of people about whom it has presented evidence of wrongdoing".
Good news everyone, an entire generation or more of people don't make phone calls regularly. We use text based form of communication that are ideally encrypted. Also this data is just metadata, I see no reason they are tracking little jimmy and his four phone calls a week to mom.
In a flash it's occurred to me that the sharper would-be perpetrators of antisocial acts might now decide not to use the telephone to communicate their dastardly plans. However all is not lost because the information collected will no doubt be put to good use.
To what extent do we know whether the same thing is happening in other countries? Do modern democracies tend to have laws that protect the public from this sort of indiscriminate surveillance?
I love how the @Verizon and @VerizonWireless Twitter accounts are happily tweeting along promotions like nothing has happened. Also, the early termination fees are going to be laughed right into a class action suit after this little mishap.
Everyone should see this relevant NYT short about William Binney, a 30 year veteran crypto-mathematician for the NSA who designed the program that is now being used by the NSA to spy on us all:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...</a><p>His story was corroborated by Mark Klein, a former ATT employee who amassed evidence that the NSA was, with ATT's complicity, running a data-gathering node in room 641A of ATT's San Francisco building:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein</a><p>This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care.