AFP/Washington

The Obama administration yesterday declassified a court order authorising collection of millions of US phone records, even as it faced new disclosures about the reach of its secret electronic surveillance programs.

Under mounting pressure from lawmakers, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the newly declassified order spells out how the government can use the call data obtained from telecom giants like Verizon.  

“The terms under which the government may access or use the records is covered by (a) detailed court order that the DNI declassified and released today,” Cole told senators.

That primary order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “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 organisations.”

Administration officials confirm the order to compile phone metadata was issued to a subsidiary of Verizon Communications in April, the Washington Post reported.

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 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 British daily the Guardian revealed the existence of a secret surveillance system known as XKeyscore that allows US intelligence to monitor “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”

The Guardian said it was the most wide-reaching program operated by the National Security Agency.

XKeyscore’s existence proved the truth of Snowden’s earlier claim, denied by some US officials, that before he quit the NSA he could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email,” it said.

Snowden, who is now stranded in the transit area of a Moscow airport, fled the US after downloading NSA files that have made for one bombshell leak after another.

Since he disclosed the vast scale of the electronic surveillance operations in June, public sentiment in the US has shifted against them.

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cole and US intelligence officers defended the metadata program as a crucial national security tool.

But the panel’s chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, sharply questioned the usefulness of the information gathered.

“If this program is not effective, it must end. And so far, I am not convinced by what I have seen,” Leahy said.

Officials said the gathered data has contributed to the disruption of 54 terror threats or events, including 13 on US soil.

Deputy FBI director Sean Joyce insisted that the telephone data program, authorised by the Patriot Act that came into law shortly after the 9/11 attacks of 2011, has played a crucial role in “closing the gaps and seams” of intelligence gathering.

 

Snowden’s father tells son to stay in Russia

The father of fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden said his son should stay in Russia because he won’t get a fair trial in the US.

“If I was him, I would stay in Russia,” Lon Snowden told the state-owned Rossia 24 news channel in Washington in an interview broadcast yesterday with a Russian voiceover.

The elder Snowden also said he was grateful to the Russian people and thanked President Vladimir Putin “for the courage and the strength to keep my son safe.”

Earlier, Lon Snowden told The Washington Post that he does not believe his son would get a fair trial in the US.

“In the Eastern District of Virginia, ... you cannot throw a rock without hitting a defence contractor - how can my son possibly get a fair trial?” he asked in the interview, a video of which was posted online.