Lessons of the Snowden Revelations

"The President’s insistence that no citizens of this country are “targeted” by the on-line snooping is now accompanied by a soberly-toned assurance that this is a “conversation” we need to have. But without Snowden’s revelations we would never have had a conversation because the government lied about these programs’ existence. Not even a week before the explosion of information about surveillance, National Security chief James Clapper told the Congress that no Americans were ever spied on. He had to squirm a few days later when asked by reporters to explain his bald-faced falsehood. 

"First off, talking about “targeting” on the Internet is absurd. The Internet is borderless — that’s its power and purpose. You simply can’t write an email confident that it won’t be read by someone overseas. Even if you’re not writing to such a person, the email can be forwarded or read by someone who is corresponding internationally. By the same token, there is no way you can prevent receiving an email from someone from another country. Once you are receiving email from overseas, you can be picked up by PRISM and you don’t know if you’ll then be part of an investigation because you don’t know who is being investigated. 

"The “no Americans targeted” spin has another purpose: to de-emphasize the fact that all Internet information is being gathered. As journalist Glen Greenwald made clear [2] in a piece published in early May, the only reason for the construction of the NSA’s new data facility [3] in Utah is to grab all information on the Internet — you need to do that to make such a huge installation cost-effective. 

"The infamous “PRISM” program isn’t a data gathering program; it’s a filtering program.
Data gathering is done by larger programs that pull everything. Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported [4] that the government routinely swaps information with thousands of companies in exchange for favors. These “trusted partners” (as they’re called) can deliver the entire Internet to the government by using off-shore servers and special agreements between them and other government branches (like the military). In that way, they don’t have to go to court for the data."

[SOURCE: Counterpunch.org]

[SOURCE: The Guardian]