SurveillanceSecond NSA domestic surveillance scheme revealed: data mining from nine U.S. ISPs
A day after it was revealed that the NSA was collecting communication information on millions of Verizon’s U.S. customers, another NSA domestic surveillance scheme was exposed: the NSA and the FBI have been tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet service providers for the purpose of harvesting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs. The information collected allowed intelligence analysts to track an individual’s movements and contacts over time.
NSA has been tracking every phone call in the U.S. since 2007 // Source: hambastagi.org
The National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI have been tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet service providers for the purpose of harvesting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs.
The information collected allowed intelligence analysts to track an individual’s movements and contacts over time. The Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time the Guardian did, reports that the program, code-named PRISM, is a classified program launched in 2007 and growing steadily since its inception.
The Post notes that during heated debates over the last two years about various aspects of the government’s domestic surveillance programs, those members of Congress who did know about PRISM, kept quiet about it regardless of their position on other domestic surveillance schemes.
The Post and the Guardian obtained briefing slides which say that the “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
This is the reason why this new tool of Internet surveillance has been the most high-volume contributor of information to the president’s Daily Brief, which referred to PRISM-obtained data in 1,477 articles last year.
The Post writes that “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 Guardian reports that when the NSA reviews a communication it believes justifies further investigation, it issues what it calls a “report.” According to the NSA, “over 2,000 PRISM-based reports” are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27 percent increase on the previous year.
In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program.
The Post notes that the companies participating knowingly in the program are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.
The briefing slides note that there has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and Skype.”
“With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s ‘extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services,’” the Post reports.
To immunize themselves from lawsuits, the companies are must accept a directive from the attorney
