PRISM

[ZenGum]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...nail-mail.html

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

It's not just your email and phone meta data. The old system of "mail covers" (where the USPS would record the metadata for snail mail of specific addresses upon the individual request of law agencies) has been expanded to automatic collection of all snail mail metadata.

Happy 4th of July, guys. Enjoy your independence and freedom.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...nail-mail.html<snip>
It's not just your email and phone meta data.
<snip>

I continue to be astounded by the vast array of resources being used in NSA surveillance programs.
It's as if someone said, Let's tap every possible way that people can communicate with one another.

To wit:




Washington Post
7/10/13

The NSA slide you haven’t seen

A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post and
published here for the first time lists “Two Types of Collection.”

One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies,
which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month.

The slide also shows a separate category labeled “Upstream,” described as
accessing “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”

The interaction between Upstream and PRISM
— which could be considered “downstream” collection because the data is already processed by tech companies —
is not entirely clear from the slide.
In addition, its description of PRISM as “collection directly from the servers”
of technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook has been disputed
by many of the companies involved. (They say access to user data is legal and limited).
<snip>

The slide also shows a crude map of the undersea cable network that
carries data from either side of North America and onto the rest of the world.
As a story in Sunday’s Post made clear, these undersea cables are essential
to worldwide data flows – and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies.

The Post version lists Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney and Oakstar but does not describe any of them.
The Guardian slide lists Fairview and Blarney but has two others blacked out.

The Post has previously reported that Blarney gathers up metadata –
describing who is speaking to whom and through what networks and devices
– as data flows through the Internet’s backbone.[

/

Has anyone seen Madam Defarge's knitting lately ?

.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Snowdon's a fool, otherwise he'd have headed straight for where the US government can't touch him...

Wall Street.