Great Satan US defends secret phone record collection

The White House has defended the gathering of phone records of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) as an effort to fight terrorism and security threats.

The admission came on Thursday, a day after The Guardian revealed a top secret court order in the US that allows the NSA to collect data on millions of Americans who are customers of Verizon Communications.

The British paper added that the court order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25.

According to the order, a copy of which the British daily had obtained, Verizon should, “on a daily basis,” give the NSA data, including phone numbers of both parties, location, the time and duration of all phone calls in its systems, both in the US and between the US and other countries.

Neither the NSA nor the American telecommunications company had any comment on the publication of the court order.

The Obama administration was already under fire for secretly obtaining the phone records of Associated Press journalists as well as the emails and phone records of a Fox News Channel reporter.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, took a swipe at the order, saying, “The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about.”