14 DAY TRIAL // The more revelations about NSA spying come out the more it's obvious that the US government has no problem with lying to its citizens, even after it becomes clear that it is lying. Only a few days ago, Barack Obama told Americans on national TV that the US did not spy on them.
Yet now the New York Times reveals that the spying goes far beyond anything the NSA or the US government have admitted to. It's common knowledge that US spy agencies access the communications of Americans talking to foreigners.
But the latest revelations show that most of the communications that pass US borders, even virtual ones, are scanned by the NSA. The agency uses wide keyword searches to look for anything suspicious in those communications, without any warrant of any kind.
While the NSA does not make a permanent record of all communications, at least not via this program, it does make a copy of all real time traffic and then searches through that copy looking for certain keywords. It is believed that most email and text-based communications are monitored like this.
The sources inside the intelligence community say that the NSA does take precautions to minimize the amount of traffic copied for these purposes and it deletes everything after the search was made.
Still, changes in the way ISP and Internet companies transmit data can lead to situations where more data than necessary is stored. This has happened on occasion in the past, apparently.
Once the search data is stored, a human operator will oversee it. From NSA's point of view, this doesn't constitute spying on Americans since there's always a foreigner involved and because the process is mostly automated.
But the fact remains that, even with the best intentions, the NSA does regularly look into the private communications of Americans, which is worrying to say the least. And that's not even accounting for abuses.