FISA Court Orders Verizon to Turn Over All Customer Phone Records

What ever happened to our free country? The Guardian, in a column by Glenn Greenwald, reports that the FBI and NSA have obtained an order from a FISA court forcing Verizon to "on an "ongoing, daily basis" give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries." The court order was obtained on April 25 and will remain in effect until July 19.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

Skeptics can read the order themselves here. Hope and change? Under the Bush administration NSA disclosed large and unspecified seizures of phone records but it never admitted to the wholesale logging of all calls of a particular carrier. Furthermore it's not known if other phone carriers have been served similar warrants. The column also makes the point that two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, are critical of the incessant spying but cannot discuss the depth of the loss of privacy as both are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and speaking openly on the subject would mean divulging classified information. "the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted."
Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Security has adopted a legal interpretation of search and seizure rules so secret that the interpretation is classified. With obvious glee the Associated Press and CBS remind the administration of the folly of picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Since his election, President Barack Obama has taken an expansive view of legal authorities in the name of national security, asserting that he can order the deaths of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism without involvement by courts, investigate reporters as criminals and — in this case — read and copy the contents of computers carried by U.S. travelers without a good reason to suspect wrongdoing.

Forget "probable cause" the DHS rules don't even require suspicion. DHS claims the right to search laptops, tablets, and cellphones for practically anything they may find. An excerpt from it directive states;

"An Officer may detain electronic devices, or copies of information contained therein, for a brief, reasonable period of time to perform a thorough border search. The search may take place on-site or at an off-site location, and is to be completed as expeditiously as possible."
Once the examination is complete and you have not been deemed a criminal, according to Homeland Security's privacy impact assessment: "CBP will contact you by telephone when the examination of the electronic device(s) is complete, to notify you that you may pick-up the item(s) during regular business hours from the location where the item(s) was detained. If it is impractical for you to pick up the device, CBP can make arrangements to ship the device to you at our expense."

DHS adopted this authoritarian attitude last summer and was sued by the ACLU. Incredibly the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals bought into the notion that the need to track down kiddy porn trumped the 4th amendment. Now the program goes back in force under revised rules.