Prism and privacy: What could they know about me?

[truedelphi]

5. I find these two paragraphs chilling:

The NSA response, meeting participants said, focused primarily on the Prism program that whistleblower Edward Snowden made public -- a tool that allows the NSA to engage in the vast surveillance of electronic communication connections. In the response, the US intelligence agency vehemently denied that the program is used to indiscriminately collect huge quantities of data in Germany. The collection of data, the response said, is subject to court authorization and is primarily used to combat terrorism. Its use is "focused, targeted, judicious and far from sweeping," the one-page response says.

The document sounds reassuring, but so too have many denials issued in recent days. In fact, the NSA response says little about how the monitoring of 500 million data connections each month can be considered focused or targeted. Furthermore, the court the statement refers to, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), is secret and, according to US media reports, confirms virtually every surveillance request made by US intelligence.