Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, the Guardian reported, Verizon Business Services must provide the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” with information from calls between the U.S. and overseas—as well as from calls made entirely inside the U.S. Calls made entirely overseas were not affected. It was unclear whether phones in other Verizon divisions—its regular cellphone operations, for instance—were similarly targeted.

The American Civil Liberties Union denounced the scope of the surveillance. "It’s analogous to the FBI stationing an agent outside every home in the country to track who goes in and who comes out," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. The organization's legislative counsel, Michelle Richardson, bluntly branded the surveillance "unconstitutional" and insisted "the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation."

And former Vice President Al Gore sharply condemned the government's actions on Twitter:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/us-govt-secretly-collecting-data-mill...

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