Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

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About the "quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type" quote, it's not clear that it's referring to PRISM. It came at the end of the long WaPo article and comes across to me as something Snowden might have said about NSA's capabilities in general, not necessarily PRISM.

  Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, 
  is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides 
  about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to 
  expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite 
  literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

If the NSA is snooping at the line level, which we know since the AT&T closet revelation a decade ago that they do, then they could see real-time typing in apps like Google Instant.

Agreed, but his point still stands that either:

1) Their budget is an order of magnitude higher; 2) PRISM is just an efficient legal data collection framework, an API that companies are forced to comply with

If they can snoop SSL'd content, that would be a bombshell. Many of the implicated companies use SSL for most of their properties. FB is all over SSL, for example.

For stuff in FB, FB could be pushing that target-specific data to collection points in real-ish time. Instead of doing daily dumps, you just provide a targeted stream of data.

He was a sysadmin for three months. He never claimed to have firsthand knowledge of this tool. He found the slides on the intranet and jumped to conclusions.

"...and jumped to conclusions"

You seem to know all about that.

Read the first five words of the WaPo paragraph I quoted again.

Where did Snowden himself claim firsthand experience? Nowhere. That sentence is the author's conjecture. It's shoddy journalism.

This is exactly the same as how the slides saying that the NSA collects data directly from the companies was misinterpreted by WaPo to mean direct access to all the companies' user data. I suspect Snowden jumped to the same conclusion when he came across those slides while sysadminning, and that's why he's in the mess he's in now.

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