3 Shocking Revelations from NSA's Most Terrifying Program Yet [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/3-shocking-revelations-nsas-most-terrifying-program-yet


NSA Director General Keith Alexander testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee in Washington, June 18, 2013. Inspired by how close they came to burying the NSA's widespread surveillance of Americans, lawmakers vowed Thursday to renew their

***SNIP

1. Internet privacy is dead. Snowden famously said, “I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email” address. XKeyscore explains how this can be done. Obviously, the government cannot collect billions of electronic messages and transactions with no smart way to sift through them, including examining them at the most detailed level. XKeyscore is the sifting and storage system for doing so. But technical capacities aside, the bottom line is online privacy is completely dead. The government now can collect dossiers on anyone down to the most intimate details of their lives. In contrast, Wednesday's White House release only concerned the NSA's narrower telephone dragnet.

2. The security state has trumped the Constitution. Snowden’s latest revelation begins by saying that any government contractor working for spy agencies can access and use this system. They don’t need a search warrant. There is no judicial process to push back. And Congress has enabled that shadow government to grow without checks and balances, which directly conflicts with the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment banning illegal searches and seizures. The Bill of Rights enshrined the quartet of police search warrants, protection against self-incrimination, trial by jury and the credo of innocent until proven guilty in response to Great Britain’s 18th-century abuses of this nature. XKeyscore completely upends those constitutional protections.

3. The security state’s defenders won’t stop lying. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers told the Guardian that Snowden is “lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he’s saying he could do.” But the Guardian’s latest article is filled with screenshots from the program that show how to search “within bodies of emails, webpages and documents.” It also mentions another NSA tool, DNI Presenter, that not only can read stored emails, but also “the content of Facebook chats or private messages.” The agency had to create software tools like this, the Guardian explained, quoting a retired NSA employee, because without them it would be left with mountains of data and no way to parse it.