"A secret court on Friday extended the National Security Agency’s authority to collect and store the phone records of tens of millions of American cellphone customers, the top U.S. intelligence official confirmed. - The decision by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court amounted to a routine renewal of the legal framework for one of the government’s most sensitive and controversial data-collection programs. But it was the first time U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged the step. - The existence of the top-secret collection effort was one of the key revelations in a series of leaks last month by Edward Snowden, the former NSA technical contractor who exposed new details of the spy agency’s surveillance programs. - Snowden provided newspapers with documents describing the NSA’s systematic efforts to collect “metadata” from cellphone records, including phone numbers and information about the time and length of phone calls. Among the documents was an April court order by a FISA judge ordering a Verizon subsidiary to provide the NSA with data on all telephone calls by its customers." - By Joby Warrick, Published: July 19 washingtonpost/world/national-security/nsa-surveillance-program-extended-by-court-intelligence-officials-reveal/2013/07/19/cb03218a-f0bf-11e2-9008-61e94a7ea20d_story.html
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 08:59:18 +0000