NSA collecting phone records for millions of Verizon customers, report says | Fox News.
But the administration has not denied the existence of the order. While the administration defended its authority to seize phone records — and stressed that it does not monitor calls — one civil liberties group called this the “broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued.”
Oh, I feel better already.
“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.
I consider changing my phone service except that when it’s all over and done we’ll discover other cell phone companies are under the same government surveillance.
And what does the White House say? Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, WH on NSA snooping: You can totally trust us concludes:
Either way, we’re left with the situation of having the federal government seizing private records without any meaningful civil due process that engages the citizens affected, whether that includes actual wiretaps or just cataloguing our calls and movements. Perhaps this will move this issue out of the partisan sphere and into a common ground in which we can all work to define exactly how far we’re willing to go in trading privacy for security. In order to get there, we’d all better recognize the hypocrisy that has abounded on this issue for far too long, and start thinking about higher principles than party affiliation when it comes to national security and constitutional protections.
Freedom isn’t free. How many of your freedom’s are you willing to give away for this mythical level of security the government is going to provide. I suspect answers will very depending on whether you can “totally trust us” or not.
