Verizon Directed by Obama Administration to Turn Over Millions of Phone Records

The Obama administration has now taken its criminality’s yet a step further with a recent demand for Verizon to turn over phone record and location data of millions of US citizens. 

NEW YORK, NY – Michael A. Mason, Chief Security Officer, Verizon attends the A Day To Connect, Inspire And Heal Summit on February 21, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Verizon)

Intelligence Briefing

by Shepard Ambellas
Intellihub.com
June 6, 2013

This comes as no surprise to most as the Obama administration has already been caught monitoring the communications of certain press members and reporters, such as Fox’s, James Rosen, inside the United States. However, now private citizens are being monitored daily.

A recent order, passed by a judge, has been issued to Verizon from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and has directed Verizon to hand over certain records to the National Security Agency (NSA). According to the terms of the warrant, Verizon will also be required to submit ongoing records on a daily basis.
While all of this stems from Section 215 of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, the law which authorizes the US government to obtain court orders for just about anything, is unconstitutional in nature and is in need of desperate revision.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explains in an article entitled, Reform the PATRIOT Act | Section 215, just what the provision allows for;

• Section 215 allows the FBI to order any person or entity to turn over “any tangible things,” so long as the FBI “specif[ies]” that the order is “for an authorized investigation… to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” 
• Section 215 vastly expands the FBI’s power to spy on ordinary people living in the United States, including United States citizens and permanent residents.
• The FBI need not show probable cause, nor even reasonable grounds to believe, that the person whose records it seeks is engaged in criminal activity. 
• The FBI need not have any suspicion that the subject of the investigation is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.
• The FBI can investigate United States persons based in part on their exercise of First Amendment rights, and it can investigate non-United States persons based solely on their exercise of First Amendment rights. For example, the FBI could spy on a person because they don’t like the books she reads, or because they don’t like the web sites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy.
• Those served with Section 215 orders are prohibited from disclosing the fact to anyone else. Those who are the subjects of the surveillance are never notified that their privacy has been compromised.
• If the government had been keeping track of what books a person had been reading, or what web sites she had been visiting, the person would never know.

As the ACLU demonstrates, the law is simply lawless.
William Benny, former NSA worker turned whistle-blower, has recently come forth on a televised news broadcast, stating that the Verizon warrants were indeed spawned from the unconstitutional provisions listed in Section 215 of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.
Some researchers estimate that over 280 million American listings are now in NSA databases, as some citizens are  likely listed or referenced several thousands of times. When you run the math, there could be over 12 trillion phone records captured in aggregate since the attacks on September 11, 2001.
These records continue to be added to and will keep accumulating, adding location data goes far past constitutional parameters, breaching everything our forefathers stood for. 

 http://intellihub.com/2013/06/06/verizon-wireless-directed-by-obama-administration-to-turn-over-millions-of-phone-records/