Obama administration defends massive phone record collection

WASHINGTON.-The Obama administration on Thursday defended its collection of the telephone records of millions of Americans as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, re-igniting a fierce debate over privacy even as it called the program critical to warding off an attack.

The admission came after Britain's Guardian newspaper published on Wednesday a secret court order authorizing the collection of phone records generated by millions of Verizon Communications customers.
Privacy advocates blasted the order as unconstitutional government surveillance and called for a review of the program amid renewed concerns about intelligence-gathering efforts launched after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The revelation also put a spotlight on the handling of intelligence and privacy issues by President Barack  Obama's administration, which already is under fire for searching the telephone records of Associated Press journalists and the emails and phone records of a Fox News Channel reporter as part of its inquiries into leaked government information.

"The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about," said Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

The White House said strict controls were in place to ensure the program did not violate civil liberties, and emphasized that the collection of data did not include listening to the calls.

"The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.
Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said the program did not abuse civil liberties and told reporters it had been used to stop a "significant" terrorist attack within the United States, but did not give details.

"It's called protecting America," added Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Leading members of Congress said the program had been going on for seven years. The White House and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said lawmakers were fully briefed.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the published court order pertained only to data such as a telephone number or the length of a call, not the subscribers' identities or listening to the actual calls.

The order requires Verizon to turn over to the National Security Agency "metadata" such as a list of numbers that called other U.S. or international numbers as well as other information on the time and location of calls. The NSA is the main U.S. intelligence-gathering agency tasked with monitoring electronic communications.
"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," the senior administration official said.