America through N.S.A.'s Prism

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/america-through-the-nsas-prism.html



“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing and other documents. The Guardian also got the briefing materials. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”

This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that such orders went to companies well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private, as Jane Mayer explains—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.

After the Post and Guardian published their stories, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said that the activities they described were “pursuant to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” and “entirely legal,” and that the reports contained “inaccuracies” he didn’t specify. (Meanwhile, other media outlets confirmed their basic account.) Clapper said that the intended targets were foreign, and that information about Americans was “incidentally acquired.” What is incidental to the government can, of course, be central to its citizens. (Foreigners whose E-mail is read might mind, too.) Clapper also called the “unauthorized disclosure” of the program “reprehensible”; this may not be the best moment for the Administration to be making such an argument for secrecy.

[kentuck]

1. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,”

Big Brother, Welcome!

[Solly Mack]

2. Here's a thought they can watch forming

F

[nashville_brook]

3. U

just thought i'd help complete the thought.

[Solly Mack]

5. Close. :)

[xchrom]

4. !

[Buns_of_Fire]

6. And to think some would scoff at us when we'd say :hi: to Agent Mike!

By the way, hi, Agent Mike!

And for that person who persists in sucking their fingers while they're logged on (you know who you are), you really should stop it. It's unhygenic. Or at least put a piece of tape over your laptop's built-in camera.

[starroute]

7. Anonymous posted what seem to be the same documents the Post got

Here's the link: http://thedocs.hostzi.com/

I've opened a couple of them and nothing tried to take over my computer. These days I guess you can trust Anonymous more than you trust your government. On the other hand, they're written in impenetrable bureaucratese, and I can't say I learned anything from them.


On edit: Here are Gizmodo's comments on the Anon leak. They're finding the documents hard going, too, but they promise to write more when they figure something out.
http://gizmodo.com/anonymous-just-leaked-a-trove-of-nsa-documents-511854773