BEIJING, July 20 (Xinhuanet) -- A former colleague of US whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has revealed more details about America’s intelligence surveillance program. He claims President Obama has not told the truth about the National Security Agency’s interception of personal communications.

William Edward Binney, once a senior intelligence official at NSA, made the comments during an interview with CCTV. He said some of his coworkers transcribed phone calls between U.S. citizens and the Green Zone in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It contradicts Obama’s claim that the NSA merely collected phone numbers and times of calls.

Early in 2013, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly authorized Verizon, the largest mobile network operator in the United States, to provide call records of millions of customers to the NSA. Binney says the Verizon data handover was not in line with the Patriot Act, which aims to deal with terrorism and foreign terrorist attempts. He added the court order itself exposed many details about the surveillance programs.

William Binney, FMR NSA Official, said, "Serial number was 13-80. That was on the top right portion of the first page of that order. A set of orders or a sequence of ordering the transfer of information from telecoms or internet service providers to NSA. And they were done every quarter. So this is the second quarter, so it was the second order that Verizon got in 2013. If for example Verizon was order number one in the quarter one, and 80 in quarter two, then there could be up to 79 companies involved. If you calculate it out, divide 20 terabytes a minute into five zettabytes. You can calculate that that’s enough to hold 500 years of the world’s communications."

(Source: CNTV.cn)