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Big Brother Bigger Than We Thought

The Snowden leaks continue to reveal the extent to which the national security state spies on ordinary people. It is now reported that the NSA routinely intercepts information passing through Google and Yahoo! servers overseas. More: According to a top-secret document cited by the Post dated 9 January 2013, millions of records a day are […]

The Snowden leaks continue to reveal the extent to which the national security state spies on ordinary people. It is now reported that the NSA routinely intercepts information passing through Google and Yahoo! servers overseas. More:

According to a top-secret document cited by the Post dated 9 January 2013, millions of records a day are sent from Yahoo and Google internal networks to NSA data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The types of information sent ranged from “metadata”, indicating who sent or received emails, the subject line and where and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

The Post’s documents state that in the preceding 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent on 181,280,466 new records.

Internet firms go to great lengths to protect their data. But the NSA documents published by the Post appear to boast about their ability to circumvent those protections. In one presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” published by the Post, an artist has added a smiley face, in apparent celebration of the NSA’s victory over Google security systems.

Here’s the original Post story. Excerpt:

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.

So it’s not just US allies who are the enemy of our government, but American companies too? When confronted by the allegations in the Washington Post, which broke the story, the NSA chief reflexively lied produced incomplete information that the NSA later corrected:

The NSA later issued a more narrowly drawn statement than the initial response by Alexander, who conceded he had not read the Post story. In its statement, the NSA specifically denied that it used the president’s executive authority to circumvent the restrictions on domestic spying, though it said nothing about the rest of the Post’s story.

The NSA now says:

“The assertion that we collect vast quantities of US persons’ data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies attorney general-approved processes to protect the privacy of US persons – minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention and dissemination.

“NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we’re focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.”

 One ring to rule them all…

Time for a new Church Commission.

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