Were you aware that U.S. intelligence agencies have a direct tap into the servers of the U.S.'s largest Internet companies? Did you know that agents can troll around the internet without cause for what they deem suspicious activity? This highly classified program, designed to look at international communications and run by the National Security Agency and the FBI, can peek at video, audio, photos, emails and other documents, including connection logs that let the government track people. Of course intelligence officials dispute these reports that the program was engaged in "data mining" and instead described the activities as "data collection." I'm not sure what the difference is here, but I'm sure the government can tell us in a 450 page legal brief.
NBC News reported, the program, code-named PRISM, was first publicly exposed Thursday evening by The Washington Post and The Guardian out of London, England. According to the Post, which reported that it had obtained an internal NSA presentation on the PRISM operation, the tool was so successful that it was the top contributor to President Barack Obama's daily intelligency brief — with 1,477 articles last year. I wonder if the R2G was one of these? The participating technology companies were a virtual "Who's Who" of Silicon Valley, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, the Post said. Companies contacted by NBC denied knowledge of the PRISM operation, which has been described as a "partnership" with the technology industry. In response to this story, representatives of some of the top tech companies responded by saying,
"Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data," Google spokesman Chris Gaither said.
"We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers," Facebook's chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, said in a statement.
"We have never heard of PRISM," an Apple spokesman told CNBC. "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."
Microsoft and Yahoo also denied to NBC News knowledge of the program, saying they only comply with legal requests for information on specific individuals. According to the NBC News sources, PRISM works in tandem with another program, code-named BLARNEY, which collects "metadata" Internet addresses, device signatures and such — as the data streams past intersections on the Internet backbone. BLARNEY, what an appropriate name!
Now call me cynical, but it appears to me that either the Feds are back dooring into these servers without the knowledge of the host companies or these companies are either voluntarily cooperating or are being forced to cooperate. My guess is the Feds are going in the back doors and these companies had no idea it was happening. Under the guise of the war on terror, the federal government is slowly putting into place a system of surveillance that can be turned against it's own people. I don't think that is the current plan, however in the wrong hands it would allow a tyrannical government the ability to watch its citizens 24 /7. It would allow for Gestapo like tactics to be used to suppress the thoughts and actions of the people. Are we heading toward the Big Brother syndrome?
Tomorrow Part 3 of The Government Out Of Control.
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