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U.S. Maintains Vast Database of Phone Calls, Lawmakers Say N.S.A. Said to Target Users’ Online Data
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has for years been compiling a library of Americans’ phone records and using computers to search the database for potential associates of terrorists or spies. But officials must receive permission from a secret court before scrutinizing particular callers flagged as suspicious and using further steps, such as listening to the content of their conversations, officials disclosed Thursday. WASHINGTON — The federal government has been secretly gathering information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years — including Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple — according to documents that emerged on Thursday. A senior government official confirmed the program, but said it targeted only foreigners abroad.
The disclosure on Wednesday of a classified court order to a Verizon subsidiary opened the door into a secret program that originated with the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance and whose survival, in some form, into the Obama administration has long been the subject of hints and speculation. While the data provided varies according to the online provider, it could include e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and logins — according to an apparently highly classified document describing the National Security Agency program called Prism.
The disclosure that the government is indeed vacuuming up and retaining “metadata” – like records of all calls made and received, but not their content – from telecommunications carriers provoked public discussion, as the Obama administration and some members of Congress from both parties defended the program, even as privacy advocates expressed furor. The program is authorized under law and was recently reauthorized by Congress, said the senior official, who said it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies issued statements strongly denying knowledge of or participation in the program.
Responding to the disclosure, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said on Thursday that the order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about. “The law does not allow the targeting of any U.S. citizen or of any person located within the United States,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a highly classified program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”
“As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” said Ms. Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. It was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act,” she said. “Therefore, it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.” But the disclosure of the documents by American and British newspapers came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding disclosures opened an extraordinary window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.
The program appears to warehouse and analyze calling “metadata” — time and number logs showing when communications have been made, but not their content or the name of any subscriber — that the government analyzes to try to identify terrorists. Mr. Chambliss, the intelligence panel’s top Republican, said that under the rules of the program, when a computer program flags a number as suspicious, the authorities return to the national security court for permission to scrutinize that person more closely. The extraordinary revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, while The Washington Post, relying upon the same presentation, simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.
“It’s metadata only and it’s what we call minimized,” Mr. Chambliss said. “All of these numbers are basically ferreted out by a computer, but if there’s a number that matches a terrorist number that has been dialed by a U.S. number or dialed from a terrorist to a U.S. number, then that may be flagged. And they may or may not seek a court order to go further on that particular instance. But that’s the only time that this information is ever used in any kind of substantive way.” Before the disclosure of the alleged Internet company surveillance program late Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told reporters on Thursday that he did not have a problem with the surveillance program because it was imperative in the war on terror. Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the kind of surveillance at issue “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism 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 added: “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.”
“If we don’t do it,” Mr. Graham said, “we’re crazy.” The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paytalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program.
Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a news conference Thursday that the National Security Agency program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He did not give more information on the possible nature of the attack. The N.S.A. and other government agencies declined to comment about the disclosures. The possibility of a broad government sweep of domestic telephone data in pursuit of potential terrorists has long been suspected by civil liberties advocates and even hinted at by members of Congress. But the public disclosure of a secret court order confirmed it in a more concrete way than ever before.
But some Democrats and Republicans greeted the news of the program with alarm. The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying. Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America’s own vast surveillance operations on its own citizens.
Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said he and other senators initially learned of the government’s review of phone records in an earlier classified briefing, and although they were concerned by what they had heard, they were limited in what they could publicly criticize. But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it.
“There’s been a concern about this issue for some time,” he told reporters in the Capitol. “That’s why I think sunsetting many of these laws is appropriate because circumstances change in terms of America’s security. And our information and knowledge change in terms of threats to America.” “A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr. Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.”
The comments by the lawmakers provided significant context to the disclosure by the Guardian newspaper on Wednesday of a court order in April to a Verizon subsidiary that provides telecommunications services to corporations. It directed the firm to turn over to the National Security Agency, “on an ongoing daily basis” until July, logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective.
It was not clear whether similar orders have gone to other subsidiaries of Verizon or to other telecommunications firms; such orders, issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, gag their recipients from talking about them. But the comments by the lawmakers on Thursday suggested that the order was just one of many that have enabled the National Security Agency to create a vast library of communications logs for data-mining purposes. Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the N.S.A. “on an ongoing daily basis” until July logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”
As the scope of the government’s collection of logs of Americans’ domestic communications started to come into greater focus on Thursday, privacy groups erupted. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union said that group — a client of Verizon’s business unit — was considering filing a lawsuit to challenge the “dragnet” surveillance, and said liberals would be furious had such a program been disclosed under a Republican administration. On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported.
“A pox on all the three houses of government,” he said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.” “As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act.”
But a senior Obama administration official asserted that its surveillance activities “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.” “Therefore, it is lawful,” she said. “It has been briefed to Congress.”
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Josh Ernest, told reporters aboard Air Force One on a flight to North Carolina on Thursday that the surveillance is subjected to a strict legal review that “reflects the president’s desire to strike the right balance between protecting our national security and protecting constitutional rights and civil liberties.” Still, Mr. Ernest said, " The president welcomes a discussion of the tradeoffs between security and civil liberties.” While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of calling information to the N.S.A.. Randy Milch, an executive vice president and general counsel, wrote that “the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.”
Following the comments by Ms. Feinstein and Mr. Chambliss, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, issued a statement confirming that the program was the one that he and Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, have been cryptically warning about for years each time the Patriot Act has come up for renewal. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted or is necessary. Sprint, T-Mobile and CenturyLink, the other major landline and wireless phone companies in the United States, all declined to say Thursday whether they were or had been under a similar court order.
“I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information,” Mr. Wyden said. “Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.” Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program defended it in part by noting that it was only for “metadata” — like logs of calls sent and received — and did not involve listening in on people’s conversations.
The Justice Department on Thursday was spearheading a multiagency effort to declassify parts of the program in order to release information about it to the public, according to a senior government official. The official said that administration officials were fearful that if parts of the program were not declassified, they would not be able to share information about it, stoking skepticism about the program. But the alleged Internet company program reported on Thursday did appear to involve eavesdropping on the contents of communications. The Guardian reported that one slide on the presentation said the operations had “assistance of communications providers in the U.S.”
But a former senior intelligence official who was involved in early efforts by the government to track communications with terror groups said that the order appeared to be part of a long-running effort by the United States to create a database of communications, which investigators could dip into if they had identified one terrorist and were trying to find his or her hidden compatriots. It was not immediately clear what the legal basis for such a program could be. Several of the companies named in the reports — including Google, Facebook and Apple — issued strong denials that any such program existed. A spokeswoman for Google, for example, said the company had “no knowledge” of the Prism program.
There are several clues inside the FISA court authorization that suggest a running database was, in fact, the objective. The order contains no “mitigation clause,'’ requiring the F.B.I. or the N.S.A. to destroy data they were not using or that was not relevant. That clause would be common, two officials said, if the FISA court had permitted the monitoring of a specific individual or group. “The normal course of events is to say you have to destroy data unless it’s helpful to a specific investigation,'’ one official said. “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” the company said in a statement. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”
Such a database would ensure that records would be retained as a library, even if the telecommunications companies deleted them after a period because there was no more business reason to retain them. But the fact that the Justice Department has continued to issue subpoenas for specific call logs — like the controversial one for Associated Press reporters’ records that came to light last month — suggests that the National Security Agency may have strictly limited access to the database only for the purpose of foreign-intelligence investigation. Apple also denied knowing about any such program.
The reference by Senator Feinstein to a program that has been operating for seven years suggested that the activity traces back to 2006, when the Bush administration was struggling over the disclosure by The New York Times that it had erected a constellation of domestic surveillance programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that did not comply with federal statutes. “We have never heard of Prism,” said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”
Aspects of the program had been controversial even inside the Bush administration. In a well-known March 2004 confrontation, Justice Department officials decided one aspect was illegal and the deputy attorney general, James B. Comey, refused to reauthorize it. In response, President Bush sent his chief of staff and his White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to the hospital room of the then-ailing attorney general, John Ashcroft, in an effort to get him to overrule Mr. Comey’s decision. While murky questions remained about the alleged Internet company program, the confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks.
In 2008, Newsweek reported that the hospital room encounter had been about a program in which the National Security Agency was vacuuming up communications metadata. Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national security administration.
By then, however, the program — or at least its legal justification — had changed. In early 2007, Mr. Gonzales, who was now the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority. Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon — have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was classified.
One part of that deal, Ms. Feinstein’s comments suggest, was to begin collecting communications metadata under orders issued by the court under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The provision, which was enacted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, allowed the F.B.I. to seek business records deemed “relevant” to an investigation; as part of a 2006 reauthorization, lawmakers had removed any need for the bureau to establish to the court why the requested items were relevant. On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted — or is even effective.
Later, some aspects of the deal with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court came under question from one of the judges, prompting Congress to enact the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. One provision protected recipients of Section 215 orders from being subject to civil lawsuits for complying with such orders going forward. “I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information,” he said. “Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.”
Later that year, The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking access to a report that Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall had disclosed that described the government’s interpretation of the statute. The Obama administration successfully fought the lawsuit. But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of broad, bipartisan support for the program.
While the lawsuit was pending in early 2012, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. criticizing the Justice Department’s stance in the litigation and further raising their alarms over the program. “If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.”
“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote. And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He gave no details.
That assertion may come under scrutiny in the days ahead. In March 2012, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall said in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that they had “grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value” of the intelligence collection operation that relied upon the Patriot Act, and could no longer “take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.”
It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications metadata and mining the database in an effort to identify associates — called a “community of interest” — of a suspected terrorist.
In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority.
One part of that deal, Ms. Feinstein’s comments suggested, was to begin collecting communications metadata under orders issued by the court under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Peter Baker contributed reporting.