U.S. Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program
Source: Washington Post
U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Published: THURSDAY, JUNE 06, 5:43 PM ET
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 persons 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 NSAs Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the Presidents 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.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
forestpath
(3,102 posts)DJ13
(23,671 posts)forestpath
(3,102 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)Although I hear the Feds have a satellite branch in Paraguay that Bushco bought back in '04-'05.
msongs
(67,433 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)L0oniX
(31,493 posts)They will know if we try to start any group to go against them and they will stop us. I suspect that this their goal.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)harun
(11,348 posts)But this train has already left the station. Quite some time ago actually.
cliffordu
(30,994 posts)Use cash as it is still king and can't be traced in amounts smaller the 10k if used publicly and an unlimited amount if used underground.
struggle4progress
(118,320 posts)to turn over ... all call logs ... Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nations largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon ..."
U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and EDWARD WYATT
Published: June 5, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/us-secretly-collecting-logs-of-business-calls.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130606&_r=0
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)struggle4progress
(118,320 posts)Iliyah
(25,111 posts)and putting forth the Shield Law may happen but not until 2014 when the Dems take the house back. Damn, why are the newspapers so late on this information. I knew about all these back in the early 2000's
PSPS
(13,609 posts)This isn't right versus left. It's the top 1% (really, the top 0.01%) versus everyone else. Congress is hopelessly corrupted and only furthers the agenda of the 1%. That's what this is really about. To them, the notion of getting the business of the 99% done is "terrorism" because it will cost the top 1% some of their loot. You see, the "they" they refer to is the 99%. Even policies that have 80% support in the country, including large majorities of republicans, never see the light of day because the 1% has its veto power over everything.
So, even if we were to have democratic majorities in both houses and the white house, nothing will change. They're all on the pad.
I wish it weren't true but I think the train left the station many years ago.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)mallard
(569 posts)We should try and be more specific here and not cast ourselves into the darkness of co-opting with post 9/11 neocon intentions to re-indentify the country. 'He' is not really us, after all, as much as he'd like to be!
Some attempts to identify the enemy as a politcal bloc have been met with disapproval by DU moderators. No stepping on toes, you see.
hypergrove
(23 posts)On January 31, 2011, Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the mandatory health insurance "individual mandate"the provision of Internal Revenue Code section 5000A imposing a "shared responsibility penalty" on nearly all Americans who fail to purchase health insurancewas outside the power of Congress. Vinson also held that the mandate could not be severed from the rest of the Affordable Care Act and struck down the entire Act.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_et_al_v._United_States_Department_of_Health_and_Human_Services (emphasis added)
This is the guy on the FISA court who gave the order to Verizon...
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)L0oniX
(31,493 posts)Then ...after a few years and plenty of time to read it they voted it in permanently.
MADem
(135,425 posts)They must find it a TERRIBLY useful system....
Otherwise, why carry on?
How interesting that all these providers voluntarily participate....
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
WestStar
(202 posts)Too little too late.
Ratty
(2,100 posts)It's the injunction against even revealing the existence of this scheme (I mean, who didn't suspect this has been going on all along anyway?) I'm pissed because I'm convinced the injunction was to prevent the public outcry we're seeing now and not to keep from alerting terrorists or any other security-related issue.
Th1onein
(8,514 posts)I'm so sick of this. Hope and change, my ass.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)How many people, even now, are really paying attention? A lot of them barely know who the President is.
struggle4progress
(118,320 posts)someone else
(55 posts)silvershadow
(10,336 posts)sure he said Americans would be shock or stunned at the broadness of the programs.
starroute
(12,977 posts)That may be the cheery side of the story. As sigint flourishes, humint -- human intelligence -- declines. That leaves us with less and less ability to know what's actually happening in other countries, particularly in volatile areas. It's the intel equivalent of every other area where we're so dependent on our technology that we get out of touch with reality. We're good at surveillance and special ops and lousy at everything else.
The truth is that massive data mining just isn't that useful. It may be an effective way of suppressing internal discontent, but it sure doesn't tell you much about the rest of the world.
MADem
(135,425 posts)See? There is a new reason to say FACEBOOK SUCKS!!!
I always assumed they were doing this, but I assumed they were more capable than they apparently are admitting to at this point....
Loudestlib
(980 posts)Clearly it's working...
MADem
(135,425 posts)Lifelong Protester
(8,421 posts)Oh, and better start changing our code words...
Malik Agar
(102 posts)Big brother is watching...
Curmudgeoness
(18,219 posts)Does that mean DU is safe????
Not that it matters, I am screwn on a few other places.
adieu
(1,009 posts)they didn't go after all my porn sites, right?
TekGryphon
(430 posts)There's people who find this outrageous.
There's people who can make arguments to justify it.
There's people who are only now outraged that Obama is doing it.
It's that third crowd that really pisses me off, and I've already told this to a handful of teabaggers on FaceBook. If people are only NOW getting outraged about this it's because they're hypocrites with no real core values.
Kablooie
(18,637 posts)Tor is an open network that anonymizes your web browsing so that network surveillance can't tell what your doing or who you're connecting to.
Hissyspit
(45,788 posts)Kablooie
(18,637 posts)I had no idea they were in a constant, ongoing war to keep Tor available to everyone in the world.
Pretty impressive.
vinny9698
(1,016 posts)We are in a global war, where the enemy is using technology to attack us. Would you all be talking like this if this technology was available during WWII? Would you let the Nazis sympathizers have their privacy?
struggle4progress
(118,320 posts)Dominic Rushe and James Ball in New York
Thursday 6 June 2013 19.48 EDT
... An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said ...
A Google spokesman also said it did not provide officials with access to its servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."
Microsoft said it only turned over data when served with a court order: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."
A Yahoo spokesman said: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining
brett_jv
(1,245 posts)I'm really wondering where the hell the WaPo got all this information ... they are just spelling out all these things as absolute 'facts' (with no attribution to where it originated) many of which it would seem to me are still entirely 'classified'.
So ... who do we believe here? I can't see these companies lying about this stuff when, if it turns out they're lying, their customers would leave in far larger numbers than would if they'd just kept their mouths shut from the beginning.
On a related note ... unfortunately, nobody ever guaranteed that anything you do on 'the internet' is actually 'private' in the sense of the government not being allowed to watch you, so ...
And as an aside ... I'd like to know exactly what the tenets of this program are in terms of the supposed 'safeguards', before I light my hair on fire and start screaming for Obama's downfall all over DU like a damn Freeper.
Maybe, just maybe, there actually ARE adequate safeguards to our privacy implemented in this program?
struggle4progress
(118,320 posts)We have never heard of PRISM, said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order ...
Google cares deeply about the security of our users data, a company spokesman said. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government back door into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.
Microsoft also provided a statement: We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we dont participate in it ...
U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras
ocpagu
(1,954 posts)They are driving US to fascism.
Bolo Boffin
(23,796 posts)The WaPo has walked this story way, way back now.
Looks like we're dealing with normal warrants for data.