Verizon subscribers, feeling paranoid? Because you are being watched

Well, isn’t that special? The Guardian has obtained a copy of a secret court order that allows the NSA to spy on millions of Verizon customers in the United States. Reporter Glenn Greenwald nails it:

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

[ Cash in on your IT stories! Send your IT tales to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll keep you anonymous and send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. | For a humorous take on the tech industry’s shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

Forget Benghazi, forget the IRS/Tea Party kerfuffle, forget every trumped-up pseudo-scandal that has been thrown against the Obama administration over the last five years. This is the real deal. Coupled with the news about the Obamanistas spying on reporters from Associated Press and Fox News, it truly does qualify for the adjective “Nixonian.”

Here’s what we know, which isn’t much.

On April 25, Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court approved a secret request from the NSA to collect all “telephony metadata” from every call made by every Verizon subscriber in the United States for a period of three months. That metadata can include your phone number, the number of the person you were calling, the unique IMSI numbers of the devices used for the call, date and time, duration of the call, and location of the callers. It doesn’t include the content of the call or the names of the callers, though the latter isn’t hard to obtain once you have all this other information.

The spooks can collect these records using a particularly egregious provision of the Patriot Act that allows for widescale hoovering of so-called business records and requires complete secrecy on the part of all parties involved. The order is so secret it’s been classified until the year 2038.

Whoever leaked that court order to Greenwald has some serious cojones, given the Obama administration’s extremely aggressive attitude toward leaks. If he or she contacted Greenwald by phone, well, the feds probably have a pretty good idea who they are.

Beyond the Bush administration

This is very much in line with the Bush administration’s wireless wiretapping scandal, with two key differences: The Verizon spying was approved by a federal judge, and it appears to cast a much wider net.

Given how extremely rare it is for a FISA court to turn down a request, though, getting a judge’s approval isn’t a very high bar to clear. Out of nearly 34,000 applications for FISA surveillance since 1979, the court has rejected exactly 11.

The judge in this case, Roger Vinson, is the same guy who declared Obamacare unconstitutional because it required people to carry health insurance. He has been famously quoted thusly:

If they decided that everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli is healthy they could mandate that everybody has to buy a certain amount of broccoli each week.

In other words, spying on millions of perfectly innocent Americans is more constitutional than forcing them to eat broccoli. Are we all clear on that?

The administration is defending this practice — because what else are they going to do? Reuters quotes an unnamed White House official:

Such information is “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States,” the official said, speaking on the condition of not being named.

“It allows counter-terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” the official added.

The bigger implications

Everything else is speculation. But it seems pretty safe to assume that — unless Al Qaeda has some exclusive arrangement with Verizon — the NSA is doing something similar with every other carrier. In fact this may simply be an extension of the warrantless wiretapping scheme, which was made retroactively legal by Congress in 2008. According to the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima:

An expert in this aspect of the law said Wednesday night that the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.

The expert referred to such orders as “rubber stamps” sought by the telephone companies to protect themselves after the disclosure in 2005 that widespread warrantless wiretaps could leave them liable for damages.

There are many, many things wrong here, staring with the basic fact that the NSA is not supposed to be spying on American citizens. But there can be only two reasons for creating a massive database of every call made in the United States over that long a period: a) it’s feeding a yottabyte-scale data mining operation being run in some NSA supercomputer center looking for patterns that allegedly identify networks of terrorists; or b) we are all “suspected terrorists.”

When it comes to the privacy of U.S. citizens, the Obama administration is no better than the Bush administration — and in many ways it’s worse.

Not to sound too paranoid, but this is how police states start, folks. First you gather “evidence,” then you decide whom you want to use it against. As Bobby Dylan once advised, “keep a clean nose and watch the plain clothes.”

Do we need a weatherman to know which way the NSA blows? Post your thoughts on the Verizon-spy debacle below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Verizon subscribers, feeling paranoid? Because you are being watched,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.