WASHINGTON — New revelations of government tracking of millions of phone calls to help combat terrorism had the Obama administration playing defense yesterday — but congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle say critics are overreacting.
“Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn’t anything that’s brand new,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday. “It’s been going on for some seven years.”
A British newspaper, The Guardian, touched off the outcry by disclosing that a confidential April 25 court order authorized the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of 120 million Verizon customers.
“Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” tweeted Democratic former Vice President Al Gore.
But Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, another Democrat, said the phone tracking is legal and necessary to fight terrorism. “It’s called protecting America,” she said.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported yesterday that the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM, include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL and Skype.
Those companies, however, told ABC News last night that they did not give government direct access to private data.
US officials indicated that phone tracking began in the Bush administration, with approval of a federal judge.
Under the system, the NSA, an arm of the Defense Department, examines the “metadata” of millions of calls made from US phones to overseas or US numbers, on wireless and landline phones alike.
The calls are not monitored or recorded and “metadata” does not include names or addresses of callers. But it does reveal the phone numbers of both parties, when a call was placed and how long it lasted.
Late last night, the director of national intelligence said that some of the reports about the program are inaccurate, and vowed to declassify some of the details.
James Clapper said that a special court reviews the program every 90 days. The court prohibits the government from indiscriminately sifting through phone data, and queries are allowed only when facts support reasonable suspicion.
NSA computers can analyze the information to identify patterns and unusual behavior in a search for what spy-catchers call “communities of interest,” such as terror networks.
If suspected terrorist activity turns up, the feds can go back to a federal court to seek authorization for names and a wiretap to listen in on phone calls.
Critics said the Obama administration’s data-mining appears bigger than the Bush-era program, and the court order specifically aims at calls from the United States, rather than calls made abroad.