Low-level NSA analysts can spy on Americans – Greenwald
NSA spying programs give access to US citizens’ private data to low-level analysts with little court approval or supervision, says Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on Washington’s PRISM surveillance system. “[PRISM] is an incredibly powerful and invasive tool,” Greenwald told ABC’s ‘This Week.’ The NSA programs are “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 said.” The NSA keeps trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases which they can access anytime with simple screen programs, he said.
Thomas Gaist: Father of Edward Snowden issues open letter to Obama denouncing “Orwellian surveillance programs” - [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. Tt’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.”