14 DAY TRIAL // It's no big surprise that, after The Guardian revealed that the phone records of every American are being handed over to the NSA and the FBI, more details are coming through.
Now, both The Guardian and the Washington Post are talking about a government program to suck data directly from nine big Internet companies.
The program, which is called PRISM, enables the NSA to access files, emails, documents, photos, audio and video chat, and pretty much everything you can do or store with several big companies.
Those companies, according to the leaked document, are Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Skype (part of Microsoft now), YouTube (part of Google), Apple, and PalTalk.
Of those, PalTalk is the only one you probably haven't heard of, but it was quite popular during the Arab Spring. All of the companies have joined the program voluntarily.
According to the document, via the PRISM program, the NSA has direct and unhindered access to all essential data collected by these companies. All have denied involvement, saying they do not provide direct access to the government, but that they do comply with legal requests.
The spying is legal, as far as the government is concerned, under the widely criticized and obviously abused Patriot Act.
The NSA doesn't collect all the data, but it has access to it. Likewise, it is focused mostly on foreign data, and even communications that have nothing to do with the US pass through US servers more often than not, thanks to the dominance of US companies on the web.
The data has proved invaluable to the NSA, which said as much in an official statement, in an attempt to portray this as just another tool in the fight against terrorism. The organization tried once again to assure the public that no innocents are targeted.
This, without actually providing any evidence that this is true. Americans and the world are supposed to trust the US government, which has been keeping this and presumably much more secret, that it doesn't overstep its attributions even if there is no oversight of its actions.
In fact, the NSA and the government are a lot more worried about how this data got out than they are about spying on all their citizens.
While critics have worried about this for years, there can be no doubt now that the US has turned into a surveillance state where everything you do online and increasingly offline is logged or at least accessible to the government.