The National Security Agency obtained a court order to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers, according to a secret document obtained by the Guardian. […]
The dragnet collection of data would allow the government to build a massive database of transactional records to map connections and relationships between callers. Although Verizon is not required to hand over caller subscriber information under the order, this doesn’t mean the NSA can’t identify the owners of phone numbers on its own. Intelligence and data collected from other sources can help match the names of accountholders to the numbers collected in the sweep.
“From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. “It’s a program in which millions of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents. It’s analogous to the FBI stationing an agent outside every home in the country to track who goes in and who comes out.” […]
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-verizon-call-records