NSA spying scandal: what we have learned | US news | The …

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been empowered by a secret order issued by the foreign intelligence court directing Verizon Communications, a mobile phone provider with 98.9 million wireless customers, to turn over all its call records for a three-month period.

The order is untargeted, meaning that the NSA can snoop on calls without suspecting anyone of wrongdoing. It was made on 25 April, days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Under the order, the NSA only gains access to the "metadata" around calls when they were made, what numbers they were made to, where they were made from and how long the calls lasted.

Obtaining the content of the calls, or the names or addresses of the callers would make the surveillance wiretapping, which would count as a separate issue legally. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the data collection of mobile phone records extends to AT&T (107 million users) and Sprint (55 million). Verizon's advertising catchphrase "Can you hear me now?" has become the butt of instant jokes on Twitter and other social media.

Internal NSA documents claim the top secret data-mining programme gives the US government access to a vast quantity of emails, chat logs and other data directly from the servers of nine internet companies. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple. The companies mentioned have all denied knowledge of or participation in the programme.

It is unknown how Prism actually works. A 41-slide PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Guardian and classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme. Unlike the collection of Verizon and other phone records, Prism surveillance can include the content of communications not just metadata.

President Barack Obama described the programmes as vital to keeping Americans safe and said the US was "going to have to make some choices between balancing privacy and security to protect against terror". The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

Prism is involved in the collection of data, but Boundless Informant organises and indexes metadata. The tool categorises communications records rather than the content of a message itself. A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. Countries are ranked according to how much information has been taken from mobile and online networks, and colour-coded depending on the extent of the NSA's spying operation.

Users are able to select a country on Boundless Informant's "heat map" to view details including metadata volume and different kinds of NSA information collection. Iran, at odds with the US and Israel over its nuclear programme and other policies, is top of the surveillance list, with more than 14bn data reports in March. Pakistan came in a close second at 13.5bn reports. Jordan, a close US ally, as well as Egypt and India are also near the top.

Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping centre has had access to the Prism system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year, prompting controversy and questions about the legality of it. The prime minister, David Cameron, insisted that the UK's intelligence services operated within the law and were subject to proper scrutiny. The foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that "law-abiding citizens" in Britain would "never be aware of all the things agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up".

GCHQ and the NSA have a relationship dating back to the second world war and have personnel stationed in each others' headquarters Fort Meade in Maryland and Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

For many observers the key question is the exposure of a troubling imbalance between security and privacy, against a background of rapid technological change that now permits clandestine surveillance on a massive and Orwellian scale. Legal safeguards and political oversight appear to be lagging behind. The Guardian revelations have underlined the sheer power of electronic snooping in the internet era and have injected new urgency into the old debate about how far a government can legitimately go in spying on its own people on the grounds that it is trying to protect them.

The leaks have led the NSA to ask the US justice department to conduct a criminal investigation. The department has said it is in the initial stages of an inquiry. Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA employee, outed himself as the Guardian's source for its series of leaks on the NSA and cyber-surveillance. He is now in Hong Kong. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he told the Guardian.

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NSA spying scandal: what we have learned | US news | The ...