NSA bouwt database van alle telefoonoproepen

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WASHINGTON - The government is secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build a database of every call made within the country, it was reported Thursday.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls to the National Security Agency program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The program does not involve listening to or taping the calls. Instead it documents who talks to whom in personal and business calls, whether local or long distance, by tracking which numbers are called, the newspaper said.

The NSA and the Office of National Intelligence Director did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

NSA is the same spy agency that conducts the controversial domestic eavesdropping program that has been acknowledged by
President Bush. The president said last year that he authorized the NSA to listen, without warrants, to international phone calls involving Americans suspected of terrorist links.

The report came as the former NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden — Bush's choice to take over leadership of the
CIA — was set to visit lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday. Hayden already faced criticism because of the NSA's secret domestic eavesdropping program. As head of the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005, Hayden also would have overseen the call-tracking program.

The NSA wants the database of domestic call records to look for any patterns that might suggest terrorist activity, USA Today said.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, told the paper that the agency operates within the law, but would not comment further on its operations.

One big telecommunications company, Qwest, has refused to turn over records to the program, the newspaper said, because of privacy and legal concerns.

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WASHINGTON - The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

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WASHINGTON - Congressional Republicans and Democrats demanded answers from the Bush administration Thursday about a government spy agency secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls to build a database of every call made within the country.

Facing intense criticism from Congress, President Bush did not confirm the work of the National Security Agency but sought to assure Americans that their privacy is being "fiercely protected."

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In January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based interest group devoted to preserving privacy and free speech in digital media, alleged in a federal lawsuit that AT&T Inc. had given the NSA direct access to the records of the more than 300 million domestic and international voice calls and the huge volume of Internet data traffic it handles each business day.

AT&T Inc. includes the AT&T Corp. and SBC Communications, Inc.

The class action lawsuit asked a court to halt the collection of this data as an illegal invasion of the privacy of innocent persons.

The Justice Department told the court on April 28 it would seek to dismiss the case under the state secrets privilege, but it added that "the fact that the United States will assert the state secrets privilege should not be construed as a confirmation or denial of any of the plaintiff's allegations, either about AT&T or the alleged surveillance activities."

The foundation's suit added that its evidence substantially confirmed a Dec. 25, 2005, Los Angeles Times story which said that since Sept. 11, 2001, "NSA has had a direct hookup into the database" at AT&T code-named "Daytona," which "keeps track of telephone numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all landline calls."

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Op vrijdag 12 mei 2006 17:40 schreef MrBean het volgende:
Als je niks te verbergen hebt ..