U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
Washington Post, 6 June 2013
VIDEO Barton Gellman on Source and Consequences
EXTRACT
Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The 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.
Phi Beta Iota: If this is true, it invites questioning everything else the US Intelligence Community is doing or not doing–or whether the US Intelligence Community has been redirected by the White House away from all foreign intelligence and toward a focus on domestic “enemies” such as activists assumed to be terrorists. This strikes us as very analogous to the drunk looking for his keys under the light — low hanging fruit, easy to taka all of it, never mind the Constitutional violations.
See Also:
DefDog: Intelligence Smoke, the Real Fires are in DoD — and the Coming Crash
Graphic: The Smart Grid — Is This Also the New Spy Grid?
Henry Kissinger: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
Owl: Is DHS Using NSA to Create a Domestic “Red List”? + DHS RECAP
Rickard Falkvinge: Further Analysis of NSA PRISM, Limited Liability of Service Providers
Rickard Falkvinge: NSA as Poster Child for Government & Corporate Corruption, Collusion, & Treason
