OUR PHONE CALLS ARE BEING RECORDED BY THE GOVERNMENT- BECAUSE THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT.

 Better be careful what you say and do, this ain't Russia, Syria, or China, It's the good ole boys in the USA who know what's best for you. Guess who has been recording all your phone calls and more.
 
Remember the last time that you heard a mysterious click on your telephone. Perhaps you joked that it was just the government listening into your tapped phones.

Guess what? It's true, the National Security Administration is secretly collecting phone record information for all U.S. calls on the Verizon network.

“Under the terms of the blanket order, CLICK HERE TO READ COURT ORDER, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls,” reports The Guardian, which broke the story today of the top-secret project after it obtained records of a court order mandating Verizon hand over the information.

Apparently the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. 

I suspect it is not just Verizon and that all cell phone carriers are involved, as well as regular land line telephones, in addition to cell phones.

It has also been reported that all of our E-mails, text messages, regardless of being transmitted by computer or phone are recorded by the U.S. government, and/or given access to even private corporations such as the Recording Industry of America (RIAA). 

The Guardian, a British newspaper, and the Washington Post reported Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies had access to the central servers of nine of the country's biggest technology firms including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype.

The Post reported the program called PRISM underwent "exponential growth" since its founding in 2007. In fact, the newspaper said the program has become the leading source of raw material for the National Security Agency, the secretive U.S. intelligence operation that monitors electronic communications. 

Throughout PRISM’s seven-year existence, operatives at the NSA and FBI have collected email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype) chats, file transfers and social networking details, with the ostensible purpose of thwarting terror attacks.

NSA, as part of this program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, Internet and email records. A furor erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by ATT, Verizon and Bell South" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity."

Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications, in other words spying on all of us.

Data covertly collected by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from American telecom and Internet firms has also been shared with its British counterpart, media reports revealed.

Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been given information gathered in the US run PRISM system, which grants the American spy agency a direct line to data stored on the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Skype, and five other tech giants.

Documents revealed that the GCHQ has had access to PRISM since at least June 2010, having generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. Access to the information has allowed the British electronic eavesdropping and security agency to bypass the formal legal process required to obtain such information from a non-UK-based company.
 
The concept of any semblance of privacy in the United States is a fantasy and the use of passwords, pin numbers, and security programs to protect our privacy, personal data is simply meaningless.

All of this law breaking by the United States government has been taking place for many years and it should be no surprise that our freedom of privacy was taken from us secretly by Big Brother a long time ago.

No-one told us but many of us knew it was happening in the name of "anti-terrorism needs", or some other "threat to America" defined by the government.

I know that whatever political party is in power is irrelevant, they are all intoxicated with their power of doing whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, because they can.

The current order apparently draws from a 2001 Bush-era provision in the Patriot Act (50 USC section 1861). The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal data sets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.

The contents of the call are supposedly not recorded and it is also not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone carrier complying with the massive spying project. The court order concerns all calls to, from, and within the United States.

With this so-called “metadata,” the government knows “the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication,” explains the Guardian.

The Senate’s tech-savviest member, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade) has been discretely warning citizens of these kinds of secretive government projects. “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” wrote Wyden and Senator Mark Udall to embattled Attorney Eric Holder.

There are many actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs.

Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all even more suspect of government spying.

Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

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

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself. 

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.  Can you hear me, yeah, that will really work to calm this fiasco down.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items.

A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

 Clearly there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individuals network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The Obama White House has responded by justifying its surveillance of millions of Americans' phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier.

The Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States".

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama.

The White House stressed that orders such as this one would only cover data about the calls rather than their content. A senior Obama administration official said: "Information of the sort has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as 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.

He continued that "as we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorizing intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorises such collection. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."

However, in 2013, such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someones name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more.

Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off.

"From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. 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, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. 

"It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."

The Obama administration again stressed that the court order only relates to call data, and does not allow the government to listen in to anyone's calls.

We stopped living in a free democracy called the United States of America many years ago. No one bothered to tell us until now, that our freedoms were taken away from us, in secret, many years ago. 

What we have is a bull shit propaganda machine that has for many, many years cloaked all of the stealing of our rights as citizens under the cloak of "protecting America". 

Whether it was the "patriotic" needs of McCarthyism to protect us from the Communist menace, or the current anti-terrorist menace, you can be assured that the government cannot be trusted to self limit itself with the guidelines it professes to follow.

The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, said on Thursday she believed a court order compelling Verizon to hand over call data relating to millions of Americans had been in place since 2006.

At an impromptu press conference on Capitol Hill, Feinstein said it was required to keep Americans safe. "This is called protecting America," said Feinstein. "People want the homeland kept safe."

Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. 

This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. 

Therefore, it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."

See how neatly and simple she makes something "legal" for those in power to deprive of us our freedoms, and to also make anything illegal at their whim. Always, they say it's done to protect us, America, now known as a "homeland". 

Based on the way our current Federal administration and past administrations, along with their associated Agencies have arrogantly in the past over reached by grossly abusing the powers granted to them, I don't believe anything that the government says, and neither should you.