The Great Cellphone Data Grab

The National Security Agency held a small ribbon cutting ceremony May 30th for its Utah Data Center. The Center, at Camp Williams near Bluffdale between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lakereportedly houses four 25,000 square foot halls of servers and routers designed to collected and store private data from the Internet, cell phones and other electronic signal-emitting devices.

Now, a British newspaper is reporting communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing. The Guardian says it’s obtained the copy of an order issued in April and was good through July 19th, from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordering Verizon to provide the NSA with telephone records of its customers.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are to be handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. However, the paper says the order doesn’t specify which type of phone customers’ records were being tracked or why.

And this is jus’ the one secret order we know about.

UPDATE:  Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Senator Dianne Feinstein of California says the National Security Agency’s top secret court order for telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon is a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice.  She says the practice is legal under the Patriot Act.

UPDATE 2: Now Republican RINO Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says he’s “glad” that the NSA is collecting telephone records — including  his  own — in an  attempt to combat terrorism.

UPDATE 3: Add AT&T and T-Mobile to the list of cell phone companies on the FISA order.