Just a few days ago, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) more or less gave a pass to the Section 702 surveillance program by the NSA (approved by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act). This is the program that combines PRISM (basically court orders to internet companies for content) and Upstream (tapping fiber backbone to sniff basically all traffic) to collect communications (not just metadata) of targets. For years, weve pointed out that the NSA defines targets differently than most everyone else does -- and people in the know, like Senator Ron Wyden, have been trying to warn us that the NSA defines targets in a manner that allows the NSA to spy on the communications of a very, very large number of innocent people. The PCLOB more or less admitted that they didnt actually see the details of what the NSA collected, but a newly analyzed trove of documents from Ed Snowden, reveals the truth. While the program may actually be useful in discovering terrorist plots, it also appears to collect a ridiculous amount of data on people who clearly are not targets, and the NSA is incredibly lax about purging the database (so-called minimization) of that unrelated information.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 13:47:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015