PRISM - a Shame on US Government.

Started by certforumz, July 06, 2013, 04:03:27 AM

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certforumz

A shame for USA Government, that it is depending on several covert operations for its economic prosperity, PRISM - a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily has been exposed by Snowden, and published in Washington Post and other leading news papers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

http://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267


HeatherSr

Excellent synopsis of the economy  It has gone too far, and probably the only thing that can happen next is a war.  Thats always good for the economy for the filthy rich isnt it?