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US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies
Rick Zeman writes "Hot on the heels of Verizon's massive data dump to NSA comes news of 'PRISM' where 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 person's movements and contacts over time. This program, established in 2007, includes major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook...and more."
is anyone really that surprised by this, though?
....from last paragraph:
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
Tinfoil hat brigade says "we did tell you so"
My life and my family's lives are more important than whatever privacy I had on these sites.
...says the anonymous coward? Am I missing some Soviet Russia joke here?
If this doesn't make you angry, upset and outraged, what will? Most of you will have relatives that fought and died to fight the evil of fascism in the Second World War. What was that all about, if you are just allowing the same thing on your own doorstep by stealth? Don't tell me about Godwin's Law, that's just a way to stifle debate. Call out this fascism for what it is. This is beyond the wildest dreams of the STASI or Stalin, because they didn't have the technology. The NSA and the CIA are rogue states within the state, they are beyond control and are not acting for you, or in your best interests. This should upset you. If there are not huge, mass protests on the streets of your state capitols all over the nation in the coming weeks, you should be ashamed of yourselves. The Orwellian state is not inevitable, but it takes actual action to stop this. Cynical tut-tutting will not do. This has to be shut down now, and proper protest is what it's going to take. Over to you.
Its a good thing your ancestors had a little more guts and a lot more principal. They were willing to die, if necessary, first to free America from being ruled by Kings and then to fight other countries who wished to force their ideologies onto the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, all that most of us from this generation had to do was not screw it up. Which it looks like we are. Hopefully these disclosures will remind everyone that the reason we have a national security apparatus is to protect our liberty.
This data poses a significant risk to a free market economy reliant on technology. Business is no longer demarcated from personal life, so spying on people means spying on business.
Would you start a new business if the government had access to all it's communications? Would you trust them not to share that information with others, or exploit it for their own benefit?
Unless there's checks and balances, like the recently neutered STOCK Act, there will be temptation to exploit this data for unimaginable gain.
NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
But are those reports anything useful? Data is cheap, especially these days. Finding useful information is as difficult as ever, perhaps more so because of the flood of data. It wasn't a lack of data that kept 9/11 from being prevented, it was the failure of FBI headquarters to listen to their own field offices.
My prediction is that, even though these programs are now being widely reported on, there will be crickets chirping after it's asked what useful information they have obtained. I won't believe it's because that information is sensitive, as government never fails to crow about the wonderful things they've done.
Just to make my position clear, I don't think these programs are justifiable no matter what useful information is collected. However, a failure to collect useful information adds insult to injury, and renders moot any debate about whether this is an acceptable tradeoff.
Parse their words. They are denying a very pointed question that wasn't asked. They are all saying, "We don't allow the government direct access to our servers"
This isn't the denial you think it is.