If the owner's phone number is unlisted, go knock on his door and explain that the Neighborhood Watch patrol is gathering the phone numbers of all residents in order to alert them of any suspicious activity.
"Are you telling us," Mr. Koppel continues, still paraphrasing American concerns, that the National Security Agency is gathering private phone records, that the government is sending terror suspects to be tortured abroad, that the C.I.A. is running its own secret prisons, and that detainees are being denied fundamental rights?
He remembers him spending "hours on the phone, gathering information, finding out what was happening".
He is accused of gathering video images, phone numbers and e-mails and passing them along to Syrian intelligence agencies.
The documents, made available by the agency in response to lawsuits by two advocacy groups, revealed that in 2009 a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court severely reprimanded the agency for violating its own procedures for gathering and analyzing phone records, and then misrepresented those violations to the court.
Every day they check local news headlines to log new cases of catastrophic hamburger aversion, and spend hours on the phone gathering the latest intel from allergy clinics and academic centers around the country.
To be exact, without warrants and using a "backdoor loophole" in the law, the agency repeatedly plunged into massive databases that, while gathering emails and phone calls from "foreign targets," swept up prodigious numbers of American ones in the process.
The bureau crafted a plan that it estimates will save $5 billion through new counting methods that include using smartphones, gathering internet and phone responses, and mining existing government records to fill out its tabulations.
Experts told the Guardian that the devices may also be capable of gathering content from phones that connect to them.
