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Title: U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
Source:
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URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/inves ... 2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
Published: Jun 6, 2013
Author: v
Post Date: 2013-06-06 19:12:13 by PSUSA2
Keywords: None
Views: 302
Comments: 15
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Thursday, June 6, 4:43 PM E-mail the writer The National Security Agency and the FBI are 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. The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues. An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports. That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil. The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.” Government officials declined to comment for this article. Roots in the ’70s PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s. The NSA calls these Special Source Operations, and PRISM falls under that rubric. The Silicon Valley operation works alongside a parallel program, code-named BLARNEY, that gathers up “metadata” — address packets, device signatures and the like — as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet. BLARNEY’s top-secret program summary, set down alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat, describes it as “an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.” But the PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over “exponential growth” in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques. Poster Comment: Page 2 at link
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#2. To: PSUSA2 (#0)
Right now at the NSA they're saying "Gee, so many people post on both the Freedom4um AND on the NAMBLA website!"
#3. To: Shoonra, fuck you (#2)
You lost me. What the exact fuck is the NSA doing snooping on us at all? THey're doing it to everyone. Maybe you can ask your buddy that worked on these programs (that you admitted to a while back) what the fuck they're up to and why. He trusted you enough to tell you about it. The only reason for them to spy on their own people is because they are afraid of their own people. Why are they afraid? This has nothing to do with terrorism, and your "friend" and/or you are a part of it. Fuck the NSA. If I found out they were all about to be killed, I wouldn't say a fucking word. You tell your cocksucking friend I said that. Maybe he can track me down.
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Replies to Comment # 2.
#7. To: Shoonra, PSUSA2 (#2)
so many people post on both the Freedom4um AND on the NAMBLA website!"
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