The administration of US President Barack Obama on Wednesday declassified a court order authorizing the collection of US telephone records, even as it faced new disclosures about the reach of its secret electronic surveillance.
Under mounting pressure from lawmakers, US Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the order spells out how the government can use the data obtained from telecoms such as Verizon.
Cole told senators that the order “provides that the government can search the data only if it has reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number being searched is associated with certain terrorist organizations.”
Administration officials confirm that an order to compile telephone metadata was issued to a subsidiary of Verizon Communications in April, the Washington Post reported, but a footnote clarifies that “telephone metadata does not include the substantive content of any communication ... or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer.”
The order was among three secret documents declassified by the office of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which said Clapper “determined that the release of these documents is in the public interest.”
The move to confront growing opposition to the secret programs came as the administration faced new disclosures from Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor at the center of the controversy.
The latest documents obtained by him and published by the Guardian revealed a secret surveillance system known as XKeyscore that allows US intelligence to monitor “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”
The National Security Agency (NSA) in a statement late on Wednesday refuted as false “the implication” that its information collection is “arbitrary and unconstrained,” and said XKeyscore is used as part of the agency’s “lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system.”
Snowden, who is now stranded in the transit area of a Moscow airport, fled the US after downloading NSA files that have formed the basis of one leak after another.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
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