The Washington Post has released four previously unpublished
slides from the NSA's PowerPoint presentation on Prism, the top-secret
programme that collects data on foreign surveillance targets from the systems
of nine participating internet companies.
The newly published top-secret documents, which the
newspaper has released with some redactions, give further details of how Prism
interfaces with the nine companies, which include such giants as Google,
Microsoft and Apple. According to annotations to the slides by the Washington
Post, the new material shows how the FBI "deploys government equipment on
private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating
company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the
NSA".
The new slides underline the scale of the Prism operation,
recording that on 5 April there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in the
programme's database. They also explain Prism's ability to gather real-time
information on live voice, text, email or internet chat services, as well as to
analyse stored data.
The 41-slide PowerPoint was leaked by the former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden to the Guardian and Washington Post, with both news
organizations publishing a selection of the slides on 6 June. The revelation of
a top-secret programme to data-mine digital information obtained with the
co-operation of the nine companies added to a storm of controversy surrounding
the NSA's surveillance operations.
Several of the participating companies listed on the third
new slide released by the Washington Post – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook,
PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple – denied at the time of the initial
publication that they had agreed to giving the NSA direct access to their
systems. Google told the Guardian that it did not "have a back door for the
government to access private user data".
The new slides show how Prism interfaces with the internet
companies as government agents track a new surveillance target. The process
begins, one annotated slide suggests, when an NSA supervisor signs off on
search terms – called "selectors" – used for each target. Analysts
are tasked with ensuring that the target is by "reasonable belief" of
at least 51% confidence likely to be a foreign national who is not within the
US at the time of data collection. The internal NSA supervision is the only
check of the analysts' determination; a further layer of supervision is added
with stored communications, where the FBI checks against its own database to
filter out known Americans.
There is also broad authorization by federal judges in the
secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which the new slides refer to
as "Special FISA Oversight and Processing". But this is of a generic
nature and not made on an individual warrant basis.
The data is intercepted by the FBI's "Data Intercept
Technology Unit", the new slides suggest. From there it can be analysed by
the FBI itself, or can be passed to the CIA "upon request".
It also automatically passes to various monitoring sections
within the NSA. These include, the annotated slides suggest, databases where
intercepted content and data is stored: Nucleon for voice, Pinwale for video,
Mainway for call records and Marina for internet records.
Once inside the NSA monitoring system there is also a stage
called "Fallout", which the Post interprets as a final layer of
filtering to reduce the intake of information about Americans.
One of the areas of greatest concern surrounding Prism and
other NSA data-mining programmes has been that although they set their sights
on foreign terror suspects, their digital net can catch thousands of
unsuspecting Americans on US soil. The slides do not reveal how many US
citizens have had their communications gathered "incidentally" in
this way.
No comments:
Post a Comment