The
Washington Post opens the
NSA/Verizon data-mining story further, with this
report of NSA tapping into the central services of nine key Internet services, "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 know 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.
Essentially, the NSA is residing in the servers of the internet services millions of Americans use on a daily basis, sucking up essentially everything. It's extracting content, the
Post reports, while a parallel program, code-named BLARNEY, gathers up "metadata," "address packets, device signatures and the like." Together, PRISM and BLARNEY are collecting the
content of your communications and the metadata, making individual internet users easy to track.
NSA analysts can apparently pull anything they like from the data, but are supposed to be focusing on foreign connections. However, the Post says, the test isn't particularly stringent and the training analysts receive tells them to "to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, 'but it’s nothing to worry about.'"
When Ron Wyden and Mark Udall began warning us of government overreach in surveillance two years ago, the breadth of the NSA wiretapping and PRISM/BLARNEY was likely what they were talking about. Neither could speak specifically about these threats because they received the information in classified briefings.
It's something to worry about, according to the leaker who provided the information to the Post:
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
The Guardian is also reporting this story.
4:27 PM PT: For what it's worth: