NSA’s Bill Stinney interview | Bill Still

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Meet PRISM / US-984XN – The US Government’s Internet Espionage Super Operation | ZeroHedge

click to go to original post at ZeroHedge

The disclosures involving this (and the prior) administration’s Big Brother surveillance state, which would make Nixon blush with envy are now coming fast and furious (one wonders – why now: even that bastion of liberalism the NY Times, has turned against Obama). Although while the Guardian’s overnight news that Verizon (and most certainly AT&T as well among others) was cooperating with the NSA on spying on US citizens, so far at least the internet seemed, if only to the great unwashed masses, immune. That is no longer the case following news from the WaPo exposing PRISM, a highly classified program, which has not been disclosed publicly before. “Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy.” What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap 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.”

The secrecy is so deep we expect even the president himself may not know about it (but he does):

 The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy.  Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues…. go here for the rest

Your Cellphone Is Spying on You: How the surveillance state co-opted personal technology | Reason.com

…There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering their locations, usually within a radius of 150 feet. By 2018 new Federal Communications Commission regulations will require that cellphone location information be even more precise: within 50 feet. Newer cellphones also are equipped with GPS technology, which uses satellites to locate the user more precisely than tower signals can. Cellphone companies retain location data for at least a year. AT&T has information going all the way back to 2008.