The Obama admin is on track to beating out the Bush admin on use of force around the world, military power expansion and spying activity. During the Bush admin, the Patriot Act was signed allowing agencies like the super secretive NSA which mostly conducts domestic and international electronic spying to collect phone records, recordings etc on all Americans and Foreigners. Since taking office, Obama has doubled down on this and new light is being shined on how deep this spying effort goes. According to new reports, the nation's biggest carrier Verizon Wireless, turns over thousands of user data to the NSA every week, which is making many Americans understandably uneasy.
In a top secret order obtained by the Guardian newspaper and published Wednesday evening, the FBI on the NSA’s behalf demanded that Verizon turn over all metadata for phone records originating in the United States for the three months beginning in late April and ending on the 19th of July. That metadata includes all so-called “non-content” data for millions of American customers’ phone calls, such as the subscriber data, recipients, locations, times and durations of every call made during that period. Aside from the sheer scope of that surveillance order, reminiscent of the warrantless wiretapping scandal under the Bush administration, the other shocking aspect of the order its target: The order specifically states that only data regarding calls originating in America are to be handed over, not those between foreigners.
source: Forbes
