Guardian newspaper reveals wider Internet surveillance
■ The British Guardian newspaper, which first carried National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive and illegal government spying, on Wednesday published a report by journalist Glenn Greenwald detailing the NSA’s “widest-reaching” program for internet spying. The program, called XKeyscore, allows the intelligence agency to carry out everything from dragnet surveillance to the reading of the contents of individual emails.
■ The system allows intelligence agents to access, sort and monitor almost all Internet traffic anywhere in the world, including the specific content of communications. It can, for example, be used to generate lists of all people who visit any web site. Once such lists are compiled, nearly all of the Internet communications of the people listed can be intercepted.
■ The Guardian’s report exposes as contemptible lies the official claim, repeated by President Obama, US intelligence chief James Clapper, top officials of the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and both Democratic and Republican congressmen, that the NSA is not able to read the contents of individual communications without extensive legal oversight and review.
■ As the Guardian report makes clear, the sweeping and intrusive searches of “emails, social media activity and browsing history” made possible by the XKeyscore system require no prior authorization.
Le Monde: XKeyscore, l'outil de la NSA pour examiner "quasiment tout ce que fait un individu sur le Web"
The Guardian: XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'
The Guardian: XKeyscore presentation from 2008 – read in full