After reporting this story here for over 18 months, citing numerous, top, former NSA I.T. employees, senior AT&T technicians, and even a former FBI counterterrorism professional--all telling us that the NSA was capturing the content of billions of calls on a monthly basis, both domestically and internationally--Glenn Greenwald has just done the same, this morning with George Stephanopoulos on "This Week," over at ABC.
Maybe--just maybe--now the public will believe this incredibly Orwellian truth (and how Congressman Jerrold Nadler obviously had it right, the first time, last month via CNET, despite our government--and even folks here at DKos parroting that propaganda--bending over backwards to obfuscate and/or outright lie about it to us, yet again)...
http://youtu.be/...
Greenwald is set to testify on the Hill this week. (Popcorn futures are already through the roof.)
Glenn Greenwald: Low-Level NSA Analysts Have ‘Powerful and Invasive’ Search Tool
Kari Rea
ABC News
Jul 28, 2013 10:17am
Today on “This Week,” Glenn Greenwald – the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs – claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.
“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years,” Greenwald told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”
Greenwald explained that while there are “legal constraints” on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.
“There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans,” Greenwald said. “You can’t target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents.”
“And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst,” he added…
Spot-on
comment/report from the blogger that posted the original You Tube video to which I failed in my attempt to link that to this post. Ended up replacing it with another You Tube video, to which this diary's now linked, above...
"It's an incredibly powerful and invasive tool," Greenwald said of the program Snowden used, "exactly the type that Mr. Snowden described. NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I've just said."
Greenwald described the capabilities of the program, accessible not just by NSA officials but by low-level private contractors: "The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and email in their databases. What these programs are are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things: it searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered; and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or connected to that IP address do in the future. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."
Greenwald noted that while "there are legal constraints on how you can spy on Americans," there's nothing stopping, or even detecting, abuse of the program...
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