WASHINGTON: Civil liberty groups, privacy campaigners and some US lawmakers reacted with outrage yesterday to revelations that the US intelligence community is monitoring millions of Americans’ telephone records.
As Washington was jolted by overnight news that US carrier Verizon was under secret court order to provide sweeping amounts of phone data to intelligence agencies, senior US lawmakers insisted the programme was legal and has been going on for years.
But critics vented their anger at what appears to be a dramatically broad scope of surveillance.
“It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
London’s The Guardian newspaper reported that Verizon, one of the major US telephone operators, is under a top-secret court order to give the National Security Agency details on all telephone calls, both domestic and international, made on its networks.
Reproducing the order on its website, the Guardian said it shows for the first time that under President Barack Obama’s administration, the phone records of millions of Americas are being indiscriminately collected by the NSA “regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing”.
The White House did not explicitly confirm the report, but a senior official acknowledged that collecting phone records was a critical part of the ongoing US war on terror, as authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
The top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee quickly defended the programme, stressing that many lawmakers are well aware of the activity. AFP
