Lawmakers and activists are denouncing the Obama administration’s collection of phone records for millions of Americans as major breach of privacy, as first reported by the Guardian on June 5, 2013. Speaking at press conference a day later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) confirmed that the secret court order granting the National Security Agency (NSA) authority to collect telephone records of millions of Americans is a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice. The information being collected is reported to include the phone numbers of both parties on a call, the location data, call duration, and unique identifiers.
As Mark Rumold, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Atlantic Wire, “This is confirmation of what we’ve long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country.”
The American Civil Liberties Union put out a statement calling for an end to the program and an investigation into the order. “From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s 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.”
Lawmakers were also quick to condemn the practice and sought more information. “[A]n astounding assault” on the U.S. Constitution is how Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) described the program. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) called it an “outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called on the White House to make additional details about the NSA’s surveillance of communications public. “I think that they have an obligation to respond immediately,” said Wyden.