Washington Post: NSA, FBI tapping directly into servers of 9 leading internet companies

On the heels of yesterday's revelation that the NSA is bulk collecting call logs from Verizon Business customers, the Washington Post is reporting tonight on another initiative, code named PRISM, According to the report, it gives the FBI and NSA the ability to extract "audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs" from the central servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL (parent company of Engadget) , Skype, YouTube, Apple. Another program called BLARNEY sniffs up metadata as it streams past "choke points" on the internet, continuing the them of bulk scooping of data most would think is private. The Post's knowledge of these programs comes from PowerPoint slides provided by a "career intelligence officer" driven to expose how deep it goes.

So what can the project see? According to the report, analysts based at Fort Meade use search terms to determine at least 51 percent confidence in a subject's "foreignness" before pulling data, which can include that of people found in a suspect's inbox. On Facebook, they can utilize the service's built in search and surveillance capabilities, monitor audio, video, chat and file transfers or access activity on Google's mail, storage, photo and search services. So... are you still logged in?

Filed under: Internet, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook

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Source: Washington Post