Lawyers representing the
government’s intelligence services claim that PRISM, the mass
surveillance program that mines data from major Internet
communication companies, does not snoop on people based on
“keywords like terrorism” and instead targets certain email
addresses and phone numbers. Isn’t that heartening?
Agence-France Presse (AFP)
writes that “they told the hearing hosted by the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board…that the NSA did not aim to scoop
up all web transmissions, but that the surveillance was narrowly
tailored to track or uncover terror suspects and other
threats.”
“We figure out what we want and we get that specifically, that’s
why it’s targeted collection rather than bulk collection,” a
representative of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence
said about the program, “which focuses on foreign suspects
outside the United States.”
“Any time there is not foreign intelligence value to collection,
by definition it will be purged,” the National Security Agency’s
Rajesh De stated.
Unsurprisingly, another NSA representative “insisted that the
American government and the NSA had acted within the law at all
times,”
according to The Register.
The claims are suspect, given the proclivity of NSA officials to
sometimes offer the “least untruthful” answer
when questioned. And even if PRISM does not itself pay attention to
keywords, that does not mean that one of the U.S. government’s 21
other
known mass surveillance projects, systems, and initiatives is
not providing PRISM with deeper information on its targets. The NSA
does, after all, employ “parallel
construction,” a tactic which Reuters
decribed last year: “federal agents are trained to
‘recreate’ the investigative trail to effectively cover up where
the information originated.”
The Guardian
reported an apparent bombshell—that “testimony by Rajesh
De contradicted denials by technology companies about their
knowledge of NSA data collection”—but the paper has
retracted that claim.
Edward Snowden spoke through a telepresence robot at a
conference on Tuesday,
assuring that “there are absolutely more revelations to come.”
Whether we’re moving closer toward a sci-fi utopia or dystopia, I
can’t tell, but the fact that a robo-Snowden has already been
unleashed seems like a good sign.
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