The White House wants you to know that it’s still protecting you from terrorism, even if has to spy on literally all of your communication to do so.

Last night The Guardian revealed that the National Security Agency has for months demanded that Verizon hand over the data for calls made on its network. While it’s been clear to whistleblowers that the government has been vacuuming up call records for years, the leak was some of  most conclusive proof of how far these surveillance programs actually go. (We’ve written a  brief explainer of what the order says, and what it means to you.)

While it would appear that the Obama administration has been caught red-handed, the administration’s reaction to the leak is both generic and unsurprising. Here’s one of the White House’s talking points, which was sent to The Week by an unnamed official:

Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.

As expected, the White House also defended some of the content of the order itself, which says that Verizon must hand over the metadata related to phone calls, not the content of the calls themselves. (Recording phone calls would be another matter entirely from a legal perspective — not that the government isn’t already doing secret wiretaps, of course.)

Core to the general defense of any metadata-related call surveillance is the logic that a call’s metadata — where it was made, how long it lasted, who it was made to — is public, not private information. The NSA’s logic is that metadata is like the information on an envelope: By making a call, you’re consenting to making that information public, which means that law enforcement should have easy access to it.

That logic may not be particularly sound, but it’s certainly been compelling enough to members of Congress, who have repeatedly approved such widespread domestic surveillance programs in the defense of national security.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one from Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

One of the sad realities about our super connected digital age is that, while technology makes it easier for us to communicate, it also makes it easier for third parties to snoop on our conversations.

This became painfully clear yesterday when The Guardian reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been quietly collecting the call data of Verizon customers since issuing a secret court order to the company back in April. The order, which extends until July, is untargeted, meaning that the NSA can snoop on calls without suspecting anyone of wrongdoing.

The implications of the news are widespread, particularly for journalists horrified at the prospect that the government can use their phone records to identify their sources. (Journalists are also still reeling from the news that the Justice Department obtained two months’ worth of call records from Associated Press reporters. It’s been a rough few weeks.)

The situation is a bit complicated, and the outrage that accompanies these kinds of stories tends to obfuscate what’s actually going on. Here’s a brief overview:

How much of this is actually new? 

Quite a lot, but still very little. While these sorts of programs have been suspected for years, this is the first time we’ve gotten such extensive proof of what’s going on — in particular during the Obama administration.

One of the more interesting details about the order is that its April 25th timing coincides with the days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Also notable is that two senators – Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado – have been warning about these sorts of broad surveillance programs for years. They just couldn’t talk about it directly. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” the senators wrote last year.

So is the NSA is snooping on my calls? 

Not exactly. Under the Verizon order, the NSA is only gaining access to the so-called “metadata” around your calls — e.g., when you made them, what numbers you made them to, how long the calls lasted, and where they were made from. Getting the actual content of the calls, or even the names or addresses of the callers, would make the surveillance wiretapping, which would be a separate issue, legally.

What can the NSA do with this information?

While the White House is arguing that call metadata isn’t private information – it’s closer to the information on an envelope, they say —  that couldn’t be further from the truth. With the right kind of data mining and analysis, the NSA can still learn a lot about you, even it doesn’t know what you’re saying while on a call or who exactly you are.

To use the most basic example, let’s say you make a lot of calls in the evening from one specific location, and you don’t move all that much while on the phone. Chances are that location is your house. Suddenly, that supposedly public information becomes a lot more private.

Still, the NSA maintains that all this information is used for pattern analysis, which should, in theory, allow it to spot suspicious activity. But it’s in the name of security that the government is also getting its hands on a ton of data that it’s never had access to previously. And that should probably scare your pants off.

Is Verizon alone? 

While its tough to say for sure, it’s hard not to imagine the NSA making similar orders with other big telecom companies like AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Let’s take the safe route and say that, no, Verizon is not alone on this.

UPDATE: Look’s like that safe route was indeed the right one. Sources told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the cell phone records data collection also extends to AT&T and Sprint. Surprise, surprise.

What can I do about this? 

Unless you’re willing to give up your smartphone forever, very little. Not only are these programs kept secret, but companies like Verizon have no choice but to abide by them. Moreover, the NSA’s program isn’t technically violating the law; Congress has been approving these sorts of things for years and has repeatedly pressed to keep them secret. As a result, like most things, the solution is clear: Vote out politicians who approve these sorts of programs — assuming you care about this at all.

While there’s a certain defeatism that accompanies news of widespread governmental surveillance, there’s good reason to suspect that this news will stir up more backlash than usual.

Photo: Flickr/Eric Hauser

“Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google said after it released its sixth transparency report today. The company releases the bi-annual reports in order to keep governments accountable as Internet companies receive more and more requests to hand over or remove data.

Today’s report represents the first half of 2012, beginning in January and ending in June. Google’s first transparency report in 2009 revealed that governments around the world made 12,539 requests for specific users’ data. That number has steadily increased, and today Google announced it received the most requests for user data it has ever seen: 20,938 requests on 34,614 different user accounts.

On top of that, Google says requests to take down data also spiked. Governments made 1,791 requests to remove 17,475 piece of data.

“The information we disclose is only an isolated sliver showing how governments interact with the Internet, since for the most part we don’t know what requests are made of other technology or telecommunications companies,” said Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post. “Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open.”

The company doesn’t let the governments sit in anonymity, however. It provides a list of the countries that submit requests and provides a snapshot of the kinds of data that government tries to take down. You can see these on its annotations page. For example, Google detailed that it received removal requests from 10 new countries, including Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Azerbaijan.

It also doesn’t comply with all of the requests. In the U.S., Google was asked to remove seven YouTube videos “for criticizing local and state government agencies, law enforcement, or public officials.” Google did not take down any of those videos.

Keyhole image via Shutterstock