Verizon Is Providind NSA With Its Call Records

Recently, we have stumbled over a new report claiming that according to a leaked court order, the NSA (National Security Agency) has been and still is collecting telephone records from a few millions cell phone users subscribed to the Verizon Wireless network, in the USA.

It seems that FBI received that order from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), and it requests from the network to allow NSA to have access to all the phone calls intermediated by Verizon Wireless. These calls can be either local or to/from other countries.

As the Guardian reports, the order was signed by the judge Roger Vinson and constraints the network  to extract for NSA, electronic copies of the calls made both local and abroad USA, as well as any other phone data that circulates within the network.

So, as the order claims, data from both parties implied in a phone call are collected by the NSA, data like call duration, location data, unique identifiers, duration and the timestamp of the calls. However, the content of the conversation wasn’t mentioned in the order.

We dug as far as we could, and found out that this order is actually a consequence of the program if mining data, which began in 2001 under of the supervision of the president’s administration,which at that time was Bush. The data mining program was established in an attempt to filter possible terrorist threat, after the attacks on 9/11. And, we weren’t supposed to find that out until April 2038, when the files were supposed to be declassified.

Even though the publication mentioned that the order doesn’t point toward an interest in the content of the calls or messages, or any other personal information, the data does build a quite complete picture of your phonebook, the people you talk with most often, when, how or why.

If you didn’t know about this, then we can tell you that this scandal is 12 hours fresh. At the tome when the story was published, NSA was having fun on Twitter. As you can imagine, a lot of USA citizens are completely outraged by this situation, considering it a privacy breach, and a lot of Verizon costumers began to threaten with canceling their subscriptions and services provided by the network.

As you probably expected, neither NSA, nor Verizon didn’t make any statement regarding the situation.

All these being said, we leave the conclusion up to you. Tell us what you think about this.