A former National Security Agency employee turned whistleblower has said the agency’s surveillance program does not target only the Verizon customers but “all U.S. citizens”. On Wednesday, The Guardian published a copy of a secret court order which requires Verizon Communications, a major telecoms provider in the U.S., to provide the National Security Agency with data on telephone calls made by all of its customers on an “ongoing, daily basis”. According to the British newspaper, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, authorizing the U.S. government to access the phone calls data for a three-month period ending on July 19. Whistleblower William Binney, who worked nearly 40 years at the NSA and resigned shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks told Democracy Now on Thursday that it was not just the customers of Verizon who were being spied on but all American citizens. “If Verizon got one, so did everybody else. Which means that they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information of all U.S. citizens,” said Binney. Moreover, The Guardian reported on Friday that according to a top secret document it had obtained, the NSA has access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other U.S. internet giants. The U.S. government began its secret surveillance of Americans shortly after the September 11 attacks. However, it was first revealed in 2006 that the Bush administration had set up a secret program to collect information on Americans’ long-distance and international calls. In 2006, the USA Today reported the goal of Bush’s secret surveillance program was “to create a database of every call ever made” within the U.S. borders. One year later, the U.S. government placed the program under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and in 2008, the U.S. Congress introduced changes to FISA which allowed both foreign and domestic surveillance “as long as the intent is to gather foreign intelligence”. In December, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law a five-year extension to FISA which “allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications and review email” with a warrant from the secret FISA court. According to The Guardian, the NSA’s access to the systems of U.S. internet giants is authorized by changes to FISA which were extended by Obama in December.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:51:57 +0000
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