Verizon

While it’s good to hear that the National Security Agency’s dragnet of Verizon customer telephone records doesn’t include audio recordings or transcriptions of calls, that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for alarm. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports, the metadata that the government is collecting includes a lot of potentially sensitive information that most citizens probably don’t want in the hands of federal officials. Mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau tells Mayer that such data can actually be “much more intrusive” than recording the calls themselves if you can track whom people call from what locations and at what times of day then “you know exactly what is happening.” More →

Revelations that the National Security Agency has been collecting call records for tens of millions of Verizon customers under a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) sparked an instant backlash on Thursday from civil liberties groups. The NSA’s data collection practices, first reported by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, require Verizon “to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries” on a daily basis. While the NSA’s sweeping collections do not include audio recordings of actual telephone calls, they do include “the numbers of both parties on a call” along with “location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls.” More →