“Every Call Ever Made” in NSA Database

We’ve known for years that the NSA sits on Himayalan store­houses of infor­ma­tion — untold mil­lions of phone calls and e-​​mails, both inside the United States and out.
But, until recently, those data­bases didn’t seem par­tic­u­larly intim­i­dat­ing, because NSA snoops were sworn to purge the iden­ti­ties of American cit­i­zens, as soon as they got caught in the sur­veil­lance net. As one for­mer sig­nal intel­li­gence spe­cial­ist told me a few months back:

“It’s drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fuck­ing cir­cum­stances turn this mas­sive appa­ra­tus on an American cit­i­zen,” one source says. “You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don’t fuck with your own peo­ple.”

Now we know dif­fer­ent. And that’s one major rea­son why this USA Today rev­e­la­tion so unnerving.

The National Security Agency has been secretly col­lect­ing the phone call records of tens of mil­lions of Americans, using data pro­vided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, peo­ple with direct knowl­edge of the arrange­ment told USA TODAY. [Qwest turned ‘em down, Glenn Greenwald notes.]
The NSA pro­gram reaches into homes and busi­nesses across the nation by amass­ing infor­ma­tion about the calls of ordi­nary Americans most of whom aren’t sus­pected of any crime. This pro­gram does not involve the NSA lis­ten­ing to or record­ing con­ver­sa­tions. But the spy agency is using the data to ana­lyze call­ing pat­terns in an effort to detect ter­ror­ist activ­ity, sources said in sep­a­rate inter­views.
“It’s the largest data­base ever assem­bled in the world,” said one per­son, who, like the oth­ers who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activ­i­ties, declined to be iden­ti­fied by name or affil­i­a­tion. The agency’s goal is “to cre­ate a data­base of every call ever made” within the nation’s bor­ders, this per­son added…
In defend­ing the pre­vi­ously dis­closed pro­gram, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclu­sively on inter­na­tional calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion must be out­side the United States.“
As a result, domes­tic call records those of calls that orig­i­nate and ter­mi­nate within U.S. bor­ders were believed to be pri­vate.
Sources, how­ever, say that is not the case. 

No won­der for­mer NSA chief Bobby Ray Inman says the pro­gram was “not autho­rized.“
Now, some peo­ple might find some small mea­sure of com­fort in the fact that this par­tic­u­lar NSA effort is only look­ing at call­ing pat­terns — not the con­tents of the calls them­selves. Don’t be. Back in January, we learned that this data-​​mining is directly lead­ing to a “flood” of tips, given to the FBI, vir­tu­ally all of which have led “to dead ends or inno­cent Americans.“
UPDATE 11:08 AM: Slashdot has a great lit­tle primer on “trap and trace” sys­tems, like the on the NSA is using here. The site also points out that the NSA has effec­tively squashed a Justice Department inquiry into its eaves­drop­ping.
UPDATE 12:30 AM: Sen. Arlen Specter has a his­tory of talk­ing tough — and then get­ting rolled by the White House. Let’s see if this time is any dif­fer­ent. “Specter, the chair­man of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today that he would call tele­phone exec­u­tives to tes­tify about a news­pa­per report describ­ing a mas­sive effort by the National Security Agency to com­pile records of phone calls.” Other law­mak­ers are pissed, too.

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