ACLU: A Guide to What We Now Know About the NSA's Dragnet Searches of Your Communications

[NYC_SKP]

08/09/2013

A Guide to What We Now Know About the NSA's Dragnet Searches of Your Communications
By Brett Max Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:39am

Charlie Savage of The New York Times confirmed this week what we have been warning about for years, including to the Supreme Court last fall: The National Security Agency (NSA) is "searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance . . . ." The rub: If you've sent an international email or text since 2008, chances are the government has looked inside of it. In other words, the same NSA surveillance dragnet that government officials have consistently dismissed as speculative and far-fetched is very, very real.

The Times's front-page story raises questions akin to those advanced by a report in The Guardian last week revealing that under a program codenamed "XKeyScore," NSA analysts use dropdown menus and filters — just like the ones we all use every single day on the web — to gain instant access to "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet." Essentially, XKeyScore is the NSA's very own, very powerful surveillance search engine.

These reports are particularly alarming in light of government officials' emphatic public statements denying that the NSA ever peeks inside the contents of Americans' communications without a warrant. We've explained why those disavowals have been misleading; now, we know they're simply untrue.

There are important details about these programs that still need to be filled in. But a large amount of information is already in the public domain. What follows is an attempt to tie together many of the threads of the last two months' worth of disclosures, in order to get a big-picture look at what the NSA is doing, and how.

More at: http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/guide-what-we-now-know-about-nsas-dragnet-searches-your-communications

[cantbeserious]

1. I Guess One Will Have To Be Pro-actively Sensible In Applying Active Measures To Protect Oneself

Too bad that Americans are subject to unreasonable search and seizure of private communication and papers.

A tragedy all around that the 4th Amendment has been so desecrated by the Oligarchs, Corporations and those they control in the Government.

[think4yourself]

2. Thanks for posting this.

Concise article and scary as hell. How anyone can defend this spying is beyond me.

[Mojorabbit]

3. Great article. Thanks! nt