10PM: The NSA information collection scandal and what it means for Utahns

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SALT LAKE CITY — The U.S. government is listening to, recording and saving your phone calls, emails, pictures and online activity.

The story broke Wednesday night when the British newspaper The Guardian leaked a "top secret" document calling on wireless provider Verizon to turn over all its users' telephone records. Now, U.S. officials confirm they've sent similar orders to all mobile phone carriers.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported another top-secret program is "downloading and storing" all of our private Internet activity on nine of the world's largest websites, including Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Skype.

The Obama administration claims the National Security Administration is simply compiling the data — not listening in or using the information unless there's a specific threat to national security. But not everyone buys that.

In Utah, where speculation is abundant because the new NSA facility near Camp Williams is a hub to store this information, the news confirmed a deepening fear.

"They are just collecting as much information as they can off of the Internet and storing it there for later perusal," said Pete Ashdown, founder of XMission, Utah's oldest independent Internet service provider.

Related:

Report: Gov't scooping up Verizon phone records The National Security Agency currently is collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, Britain's Guardian newspaper said Wednesday.

News of the government's collection of private information is "just the tip of the iceberg," Ashdown said.

The initial information about government monitoring of Verizon Wireless phone customers prompted swift reaction from Utah Sen. Mike Lee in Washington, D.C.

"They basically said to Verizon, ‘Give us your call logs. If they involve international calls, give them to us. If they involve domestic calls, give them to us. If they involve purely local calls, give them to us. We want all of them.' And that's a little disturbing to some of us," Lee said.

Subsequent news of Internet eavesdropping by way of a complex program called PRISM, which pulls users' information from various online sites, wasn't surprising to Ashdown.

"The way the Internet is set up right now, a lot of that information that transfers over the Internet is unencrypted, and it's free for the taking," he said.

At the heart of the issue: If the government is monitoring phone and Internet usage by private citizens, what are they doing with it?

While there was little information coming from the NSA Thursday night, there is a growing level of concern among most private citizens. Exactly where does the Constitution and privacy come into play here? Only time will tell.

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