Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Following yesterday’s report by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian newspaper that the U.S. government was engaged in data mining tens of millions of telephone calls, today both The Guardian and the Washington Post carry reports of a Top Secret federal government program called PRISM which allows snooping into the contents of emails, live chats and Skype communications of both Americans and foreigners.
According to the Washington Post, a career intelligence officer was so deeply disturbed by first hand experience with the program that he turned over 41 PowerPoint slides and other documents about PRISM to the newspaper. The Post reports the officer stating: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
The slides are marked Top Secret, ORCON for Originator Controlled, and NOFORN meaning no foreign access. The government is already striking out at the release of the classified information. Late yesterday, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, issued a statement calling the release of the slides “reprehensible.” He also alluded to errors in the reporting by The Post and The Guardian but didn’t provide any specifics.
According to one document, the government is tapping directly into the servers of nine of the largest internet providers: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” Twitter is not included on the list of “private sector partners.”
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft denied that the government is directly tapping into their servers. The Post explains that this may be a matter of semantics, citing to another document that describes the technology as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.
Another document obtained from the intelligence officer informs that “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources.”
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