Report: U.S. Collecting Verizon Customer Phone Records

Britain's Guardian newspaper is reporting that the U.S. government is collecting the phone records of millions of U.S. Verizon customers under a top secret court order. According to the report, the order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25th, and is good until July 19th. It requires that Verizon give the National Security Agency information on all phone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries, on an ongoing, daily basis. The Guardian said that the court order, made under the Patriot Act, shows that the communication records of millions of Americans are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing. The information being handed over is about location of calls, their time, duration and unique identifiers, but not the content of the conversations. Verizon declined comment, as did the White House, which referred questions to the NSA. It also had no immediate comment.