And I voted for...

[VTA]

Doesn't matter. If anyone thinks their partisan choice affords them any advantage they're as dumb as rotten log.

Both sides have the same goal in mind, that being the absolute authority over you. The smiling clown in the well-tailored suit doesn't really care about you, or the faceless demographics he cites to tug the heart strings of your emotions to get you to trust him and ignore his acts. Not get your vote, that's already taken care of - but your continued apathy, complacency and mindless trust to continue following your own little pursuits of entertainment, pleasure, whatever - without forming much of a protest.

Sure, if they threaten to SOPA or some such shit, plenty will cry, but they'll just slip it in the new copyright laws and get it through that way. Because it won't be mentioned. We're all guilty of allowing ourselves to be distracted with perpetual entertainment and our willingness to allow advertisers complete access into our entire existence.

Last night, the Washington Post and Guardian dropped concurrent bombshell reports. Their subject was PRISM, a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily. PRISM has allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years. But what is it, exactly?

PRISM is a secret government program...

As much as PRISM might sound like a comic book antagonist of S.H.I.E.L.D., it's the codename for a very real US government program. According to leaked documents, it went into effect in 2007, and has only gained momentum since. Its stated purpose is to monitor potentially valuable foreign communications that might pass through US servers, but it appears that in practice its scope was far greater.

PRISM information, according to the Post, accounts for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports. That's staggering.

...that gives the NSA unprecedented access to the servers of major tech companies...

Microsoft. Yahoo. Google. Facebook. PalTalk. AOL. Skype. YouTube. Apple. If you've interacted with any of those companies in the last six years, that information is vulnerable under PRISM. But how?

The initial reports from last night suggested that the process works as follows: The companies mentioned above (and who knows how many others) receive a directive from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. They hand over access to their servers—and the tremendous wealth of data and communiques that passes through them every day—to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which in turn relays it to the NSA.

And that's when things get interesting.

...so that the agency can spy on unwitting US citizens...

It seems impossible that the NSA, an agency which by law is only allowed to monitor foreign communications, has so much access to domestic information. And yet!

There are, as you might expect, filters in place to help handle the fire hose of data that comes through daily, the trillions of bits and bytes that make up our online identities and lives. Something to ensure that only the bad guys are being tracked and not honest, everyday citizens. Actually, there's one filter, and it's ridiculous: an NSA analyst has to have "51 percent" confidence that a subject is "foreign." After that, it's carte blanche.

That's it. That's the only filter. And it's an ineffective one, at that; the PowerPoint slides published by the post acknowledge that domestic citizens get caught in the web, but that it's "nothing to worry about."

...with terrifying granularity...

It's something to worry about.

What's most troubling about PRISM isn't that it collects data. It's the type of data it collects. According to the Washington Post report, that includes:

…audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs… [Skype] can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone, and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.
Did you get all that? Similar depth of access applies to Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. Just to be clear: this covers practically anything you've ever done online, up to and including Google searches as you type them.

...which is both different from and more aggressive than the Verizon scandal...

The news of PRISM broke soon after a separate report, about the NSA's having access to Verizon customer—and, according to an NBC report, everyone else's—phone logs. Surprisingly enough, this is a totally different program! And PRISM makes the Verizon thing look like an ACLU company picnic by comparison.

When the NSA monitors phone records, it reportedly only collects the metadata therein. That includes to and from whom the calls were made, where the calls came from, and other generalized info. Importantly, as far as we know, the actual content of the calls was off-limits.

By contrast, PRISM apparently allows full access not just to the fact that an email or chat was sent, but also the contents of those emails and chats. According to the Washington Post's source, they can "literally watch you as you type." They could be doing it right now.

...and has the full (but contested) cooperation of tech giants...

PRISM's first corporate partner was allegedly Microsoft, which according to the Post and Guardian signed on back in 2007. Other companies slowly joined, with Apple being the most recent enlistee. Twitter, it seems, has not complied.

Go read the entire thing...

 

[Midswat]

I bet the NSA is monitoring the DCU. They're probably reading this right now. :wave

 

[Jon88]

Fuck you NSA!

Bite me!

 

[MetalHead]

I'm not surprised.