NSA - Prism Bigger than just Verizon

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...iants-nsa-data

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. 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 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.

The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

Phone Sex, Banks & Google for Emails: The NSA Spying Is Bigger Than Verizon

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/polit...nalysis/65963/

The National Security Agency's warrant for metadata on every single Verizon call for three months is jaw-dropping in its scope. Except, well, the NSA's surveillance of our communications is most likely much, much bigger than that. Technology has made it possible for the American government to spy on citizens to an extent East Germany could only dream of. Basically everything we say that can be traced digitally is being collected by the NSA. We're supposed to trust that our government will be much better behaved, but they're not, and the White House almost admits it. That doesn't mean they're admitting everything.

"On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records," The Week's Marc Ambinder writes of Glenn Greenwald's scoop last night. "My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes." Previous reporting from many outlets suggests that's true. In 2006, USA Today's Leslie Cauley reported the NSA was secretly collecting call records with data from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. A source told Cauley, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world" and that the NSA wanted "to create a database of every call ever made" within U.S. territory. Likewise, in 2011, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer spoke to former NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, who "believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later." He thinks the NSA wants all emails to be searchable, the same way we search with Google. "The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress," Mayer said. As Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Atlantic Wire last night, "This is confirmation of what we've long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country." Update: In defending the program, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems to indicate that the court order is a regular, quarterly thing. "There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is, that this was a routine three-month approval under seal that was leaked," Feinstein said on Thursday.

And the NSA isn't just collecting the things we say. It's also tracking what we buy and where we go. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman reported that the NSA's domestic data collection "have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks." That means emails records, bank transfers, phone records, travel records.

As Ambinder explains, there's a difference between collecting the call data, analyzing the data, and eavesdropping on the calls. The government's talking points defend the program by noting the NSA might know the length and location of your phone calls, but at least they weren't listening in. "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls," the talking points say. The "senior government official" does not directly confirm the court order is real, but says that "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, 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."

That sounds so noble. And the NSA would never abuse its awesome surveillance power, right? Wrong. In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America. They listened in on both satellite phone calls and calls from the phone banks in Iraq's Green Zone where soldiers call home. Former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk described how a coworker would say, "Hey, check this out… there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out." Faulk explained they would gossip about the best calls during breaks. "It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"

U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.


The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The order does not apply to the content of the communications.

Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cellphone services, or to other telecommunications carriers. The order prohibits its recipient from discussing its existence, and representatives of both Verizon and AT&T declined to comment Wednesday evening.

The four-page order was disclosed Wednesday evening by the newspaper The Guardian. Obama administration officials at the F.B.I. and the White House also declined to comment on it Wednesday evening, but did not deny the report, and a person familiar with the order confirmed its authenticity. “We will respond as soon as we can,” said Marci Green Miller, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security purposes, that allows the government to secretly obtain “tangible things” like a business’s customer records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The order was marked “TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN,” referring to communications-related intelligence information that may not be released to noncitizens. That would make it among the most closely held secrets in the federal government, and its disclosure comes amid a furor over the Obama administration’s aggressive tactics in its investigations of leaks.

The collection of call logs is set to expire in July unless the court extends it.

The collection of communications logs — or calling “metadata” — is believed to be a major component of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance that took place without court orders. The newly disclosed order raised the question of whether the government continued that type of information collection by bringing it under the Patriot Act.

The disclosure late Wednesday seemed likely to inspire further controversy over the scope of government surveillance. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, said that “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law” under the Bush administration. “On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?” she said.

For several years, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have been cryptically warning that the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under that section of the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming to the public if it knew about it.

“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 last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

They added: “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

A spokesman for Senator Wyden did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the Verizon order.

The senators were angry because the Obama administration described Section 215 orders as being similar to a grand jury subpoena for obtaining business records, like a suspect’s hotel or credit card records, in the course of an ordinary criminal investigation. The senators said the secret interpretation of the law was nothing like that.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act made it easier to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records so long as they were merely deemed “relevant” to a national-security investigation.

The Justice Department has denied being misleading about the Patriot Act. Department officials have acknowledged since 2009 that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and have insisted that their statements about the matter have been accurate.

The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2011 for a report describing the government’s interpretation of its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act. But the Obama administration withheld the report, and a judge dismissed the case.

Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/polit...on-us-20130606

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.

It made little difference.

Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state—one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs. If anything, things have gotten worse.

Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone.

Seizing telephone records at the Associated Press in violation of Justice Department guidelines.

Accusing a respected Fox News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job.

Detaining terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite promises to end the ill-considered Bush policy.

Even the IRS scandal, while not a matter of foreign policy, strikes at the heart of growing concerns among Americans that their privacy is government's playpen.

And now this: The Guardian newspaper reports that the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of one of the nation's largest phone companies, Verizon.

If the story is accurate, the action appears to be legal. The order was signed by a judge from a secret court that oversees domestic surveillance. It may also be necessary; U.S. intelligence needs every advantage it can get over the nation's enemies.

But for several reasons the news is chilling.

Verizon probably isn't the only company coughing up its documents. Odds are incredibly strong that the government is prying into your telephone records today.
Issued in April, the NSA order "could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued," according to The Washington Post. "It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
This appears to be a "rubber stamp," order, reissued every few months since 2001. As is the case with all government programs, the systematic snooping into your telephone records is unlikely to ever expire without public outcry.
Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.
The Bush-Obama White House hates transparency. President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were justifiably criticized by Democrats (none more successfully so than Obama himself) for their penchant for secrecy. Obama promised that he would run history's most transparent administration. By almost any measure, on domestic and well as foreign policies, Obama has broken that promise.

It is the lack of transparency that is most galling about the security versus civil liberties debate under Obama, because it shows his lack of faith in the public. Americans know a high level of secrecy and dirty work is needed to keep them safe. Most trust their president. Many approve of his job performance.

Still, they expect and deserve an open discussion about how to fight terrorism without undermining the Constitution.

Obama started that conversation with a recent address on the drone program, media leaks and the need to move American off a constant war footing. It was a compelling and well-considered argument for the balance he is claiming to strike.

But he made the speech under pressure, and reluctantly. It only came amid new revelations about the drone program and the disclosure of newsroom spying (the Guardian may well be in Obama's sights next). Under Bush, the warrantless-wiretap program only stopped after it was publicly disclosed. In that way, the Guardian story is not a surprise, so why didn't Obama long ago acknowledge, explain, and justify such an intrusion into privacy?

Obama has promised to adjust the drone and leaks investigation policies, essentially acknowledging that his administration had gone too far in the name of security. Do you believe him?

One thing we've learned about the Bush-Obama White House is that words don't matter. Watch what they do.

NSA's Verizon Spying Order Specifically Targeted Americans, Not Foreigners

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...ot-foreigners/

The National Security Agency has long justified its spying powers by arguing that its charter allows surveillance on those outside of the United States, while avoiding intrusions into the private communications of American citizens. But the latest revelation of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance shows that it has focused specifically on Americans, to the degree that its data collection has in at least one major spying incident explicitly excluded those outside the United States.

In a top secret order obtained by the Guardian newspaper and published Wednesday evening, the FBI on the NSA’s behalf demanded that Verizon turn over all metadata for phone records originating in the United States for the three months beginning in late April and ending on the 19th of July. That metadata includes all so-called “non-content” data for millions of American customers’ phone calls, such as the subscriber data, recipients, locations, times and durations of every call made during that period.

Aside from the sheer scope of that surveillance order, reminiscent of the warrantless wiretapping scandal under the Bush administration, the other shocking aspect of the order its target: The order specifically states that only data regarding calls originating in America are to be handed over, not those between foreigners.

“It is hereby ordered that [Verizon Business Network Services'] Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency…all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” the Guardian’s copy of the order reads. “This Order does not require Verizon to include telephony metadata for communications wholly originating and terminating in foreign countries.”

Though the classified, top secret order comes from the FBI, it clearly states that the data is to be given to the NSA. That means the leaked document may serve as one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that the NSA’s spying goes beyond foreigners to include Americans, despite its charter specifically disallowing surveillance of those within the United States.

“In many ways it’s even more troubling than [Bush era] warrantless wiretapping, in part because the program is purely domestic,” says Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.”But this is also an indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”

The leaked document, in fact, is labelled as an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body whose powers were created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and then broadened after the September 11th, 2001 attacks, with the purpose of intercepting communications between foreign agents and those between enemies abroad and their agents within the U.S. Similarly, the NSA’s charter states that it focuses on interception and analysis of foreign communications, not those within the United States.

But the Verizon order seems to show that the NSA, using FISA, has specifically gathered communications data that both begins and ends with Americans. That domestic surveillance may be allowed under FISA’s low standard for the “relevance” of the data demanded from Internet companies and telephone carriers in the investigations of foreigners, says Julian Sanchez, a research fellow with the CATO Institute focused on privacy and civil liberties. ”The overall purpose of this program is to identify foreign terrorists,” says Julian Sanchez. “But in fact it extends well beyond whether the individual you’re investigating is foreign. If you think an American citizens’s email has information about what a foreign power or individual is doing, that’s ‘relevant.’ The purpose of the investigation is not a constraint on the target or the people from whom the information is sought.”

“If they data mine huge blocks of call records, they’re getting lots of innocent Americans’ data,” adds Sanchez, “But the argument, I imagine, is ‘we’re doing data mining to look for suspicious patterns to help us identify foreign terrorists.’”

My colleague Kashmir Hill has contacted the NSA and Verizon for comment, and I’ll update this post if we hear back from either of the two. Update: Verizon has declined to comment.

In fact, the Verizon order may be just a glimpse of a much larger surveillance program. It’s unclear whether other carriers, not to mention Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, have been caught up in similar domestic surveillance, or how long that surveillance has been taking place. But as the Guardian notes, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have issued cryptic warnings for the last two years that the Obama administration has engaged in widespread surveillance of Americans.

Other phone carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all responded to a congressional inquiry on government surveillance last year, stating that they had turned over hundreds of thousands of users’ records to law enforcement agencies, though that inquiry didn’t focus on intelligence agency requests.

In a congressional hearing in March of last year, the NSA’s Director Keith Alexander responded to questions from Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, who brought up allegations of the NSA’s domestic spying made in a Wired magazine article earlier that month, denying fourteen times that the NSA intercepted Americans’ communications.

“What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?” Johnson asked at the time.

“Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead,” responded Alexander. “If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.”

In light of this latest leak and the surveillance it’s exposed, the NSA may have some more explaining to do.

Read the full FISA court order sent to Verizon here.

Court ruling here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/inte...ta-court-order

So, what exactly is the definition of "national security purposes"?

go ask bush since he signed the patriot act into law giving this power to the NSA, FBI

Originally Posted by GMTIRRILL

go ask bush since he signed the patriot act into law giving this power to the NSA, FBI

Go ask Obama since he signed it again in 2011.

If you want to be a partisan hack, go right ahead. Who just gave it a four year extension? Obama.

Who in the congress just voted for the extension?

The Senate voted 72-23 The House 250-153

Who authorized it in congress the first time? Seems like Dems voted for it then too.

Senate Democrats who Voted FOR the Patriot Act in 2011 for Obama to sign.

Bennet (D-CO)
Boxer (D-CA)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Conrad (D-ND)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hagan (D-NC)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Manchin (D-WV)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Warner (D-VA)
Webb (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)

Which ones didn't?

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Begich (D-AK)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Coons (D-DE)
Durbin (D-IL)
Franken (D-MN)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Murray (D-WA)
Tester (D-MT)
Udall (D-CO)
Udall (D-NM)
Wyden (D-OR)

That was in 2011

So don't start that BS party crap. They are both the same.

I'll stick with the quote from the fourth post.

Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.

Author of Patriot Act says NSA phone records collection 'never the intent' of law

It never is. Is it?

The author of the Patriot Act said Thursday that a secret program under which the Obama administration was collecting phone records from millions of Americans is "excessive" and beyond the scope of the law.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who wrote the 2001 law, was among a host of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who raised alarm over the practice.

The Guardian newspaper first reported the National Security Agency had been collecting records under a court order from millions of Verizon customers in the U.S. Defenders of the program tried to ease the furor by assuring the public this is "nothing new" -- and in fact has been going on for seven years. But the acknowledgement that the program is long running only fueled the outrage from civil liberties groups and lawmakers who described it as a blatant overreach.

"This is a big deal, a really big deal," Sensenbrenner told Fox News, adding that such a broad seizure was "never the intent" of the law. He floated the possibility of amending the Patriot Act before its 2015 expiration to stop this.

In a separate statement, he called the program "excessive and un-American."

The Republican lawmaker also fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder -- who would not comment on the program when asked about it Thursday -- explaining why he thinks the records collection goes astray of the law. He noted that the key section of the law that allows the government to obtain business records requires the information to be relevant to an authorized investigation.

"How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation?" he asked in the letter.

He said the order "could not have been drafted more broadly," and said he does not think it's "consistent" with the law's requirements.

A handful of in-the-know lawmakers lined up to defend the program, while acknowledging the need to protect privacy.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House intelligence committee, said the effort is not "data mining," and has helped quash a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the past few years. He would not elaborate.

The leaders of the Senate intelligence committee also defended the program, saying it is "nothing new." Republican Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss said it's been going on for seven years.

Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said these orders are actually renewed every three months through the court. She said the records are there for investigators to access if there is suspicion of terrorist activity.

"The threat from terrorism remains very real and these lawful intelligence activities must continue, with the careful oversight of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government," Feinstein and Chambliss said in a joint statement.

Speaking later in the day, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said "everyone should just calm down."

Administration officials, while not directly acknowledging the order, defended their authority to collect records and stressed they're not listening in on conversations.

However, civil liberties groups and some lawmakers sounded the alarm over the collection effort.

"The National Security Agency's seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon's phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said.

One civil liberties group called this the "broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued."

"It requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S.," the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has historically opposed the Patriot Act, said the effort "is not what democracy is about."

The report in the Guardian newspaper follows revelations that the Justice Department was seizing the phone records of journalists, including at Fox News, in the course of leak probes.

The order, a copy of which apparently was obtained by The Guardian, reportedly was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19.

It requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The text of the order, as published by The Guardian, says that "the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the" the records in question.

The newspaper claims the document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.