The system set in place at the NSA makes it very easy for someone to check out all data

Jul 29, 2013 07:58 GMT  ·  By

Over the past couple of months, more and more stories have come out regarding the NSA spying programs, thanks to some documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

And aside from NSA employees and Snowden himself, Glenn Greenwald might be the only one to know this many details about the surveillance done by the agency, since he is the one to whom the whistleblower passed thousands of documents.

In an interview for ABC, Greenwald said PRISM is an incredibly powerful and invasive tool, just as he’s reported over the past few weeks.

According to him, the NSA keeps a database full of trillions of emails and phone calls that they can access at any time.

“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,” he explained.

“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.”

The NSA and some politicians have claimed they were being constrained by laws and by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the court assigned to it. However, Greenwald says that, when permission is given by the FISA court, the systems allow analysts to listen to whatever telephone calls they want, to view emails, browsing histories, and Microsoft Word documents.

“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,” the journalist says.

Greenwald will testify before a Congressional committee this week, along with NSA officials who have downplayed the claims made by the media and Edward Snowden regarding the agency’s programs.