Most, if not all, phone numbers and other data associated with calls carried by major US phone companies – but not the contents of the call itself – are being collected, including those of many Americans, leaked documents indicate. In April, a subsidiary of Verizon was ordered to send to the National Security Agency (NSA) “on an ongoing daily basis” through July the “telephony metadata” or communications logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” according to a four-page “top secret” order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed by a federal judge. The document was leaked to The Guardian, a London newspaper that received the leaked document, and to The Washington Post.
Under a separate program called PRISM, major chunks of social media data ascribed to foreign users are being shared with the US government by Internet companies, although it’s not clear how much or how tightly circumscribed that collection is.
