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"Civil liberties and privacy groups are fuming over a court order allowing the National Security Agency to collect phone records from millions of Verizon customers revealed late Wednesday. \n\"From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming,\" said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. \"It\u2019s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents.\" \nJaffer went on to call the program \"beyond Orwellian.\" Center for Democracy and Technology President Leslie Harris called it a \"massive abuse of the Patriot Act.\"\nSEE ALSO: Obama Administration: Collecting Verizon Records a 'Critical Tool'\n\n\"The NSA is collecting the telephone call records of Americans who have nothing to do with terrorism or terrorists, and who pose no threat to U.S. national security,\" Harris said.\n\"The people responsible for this should go to prison for it,\" said co-director of Fight for the Future Holmes Wilson.\nThe leaked order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, compels Verizon to continuously supply the NSA with millions of business customers' phone records, including numbers, call durations, call times and routing information, for all calls made inside the United States and between the U.S. and other countries. The order did not include recordings of customers' conversations.\nFirst reported by The Guardian, the order is the first evidence we've seen that the Obama administration is engaged in secret, warrantless mass surveillance of Americans not suspected of crimes. \nPresident George W. Bush approved a secret widespread NSA surveillance program just after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Bush's program was exposed in 2006. It was unknown until now whether the Obama administration was conducting similar secret surveillance efforts, though Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) vaguely hinted that such efforts existed in 2011.\n\"Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation,\" said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. \nRecipients of FISC orders are legally prohibited from discussing them, so it's unknown if Verizon's personal customers or other telecoms' customers are also being monitored by the NSA. The ACLU is in the process of suing the Department of Justice through the Freedom of Information Act to reveal more information about Section 215 and how the federal government has interpreted it.\nImage via Chris Hondros/Getty News"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/06/06/privacy-nsa-verizon/>