Guardian, The

NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013. During that year, it submitted 178 applications for the data to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during that period, which, as first revealed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden, permitted the ongoing, daily collection of practically all US phone records.

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

Fox moves to use Aereo ruling against Dish streaming service

A day after a surprise Supreme Court decision to outlaw streaming TV service Aereo, US broadcaster Fox has moved to use the ruling to clamp down on another Internet TV service.

Fox has cited the ruling -- which found Aereo to be operating illegally -- to bolster its claim against a service offered by Dish, America’s third largest pay TV service, which streams live TV programming over the Internet to its subscribers and allows them to copy programs onto tablet computers for viewing outside the home.

The move has fueled criticism of the Aereo ruling from groups that have argued the decision will limit consumer choice, hand more power to broadcasters and stifle innovation.

Immediately after the Aereo ruling, Fox’s legal team submitted the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision to bolster its case against Dish. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled before the ninth circuit court of appeals on 7 July in Pasadena, California.

Britain's intelligence agencies are told to make privacy invasion assessment

Britain's security and intelligence agencies should consider how far they are invading people's privacy when they seek permission for intrusive surveillance, their government-appointed watchdog has recommended.

Sir Mark Waller, the intelligence services commissioner, said the agencies should set out the specific invasion of privacy requested so that a proper assessment could be made of whether it was justified. Before invading people's privacy, the intelligence services must satisfy the minister that intrusive surveillance is necessary and proportionate, which means that the intelligence gain will be sufficiently great to justify the intrusion into the privacy of the target and any unavoidable collateral intrusion into the privacy of others.

The commissioner says he questions staff about how they have applied the tests of necessity and proportionality. Concerns that the interference may have been disproportionate seem to have prompted Sir Waller's insistence that the agencies pay more attention to privacy in future.

"I have recommended to all the agencies that separate consideration be given to the individual privacy being invaded as part of the test for proportionality," he said in his concluding chapter. "In all cases, I want to see this set out separately in the application for these intrusive techniques and to see this wording reflected in the warrants."

Congress wants NSA reform after all. President Obama and the Senate need to pass it

[Commentary] If you got angry in May when the National Security Agency, the White House and Eric Cantor's spy-friendly House of Representatives took a once-promising surveillance reform bill and turned it into a shit sandwich, I've got some good news for you: so, apparently, did many members of Congress.

Recently, in a surprising rebuke to the NSA's lawyers and the White House -- after they co-opted and secretly re-wrote the USA Freedom Act and got it passed -- an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives voted to strip the agency of its powers to search Americans' emails without a warrant, to prohibit the NSA or CIA from pressuring tech companies to install so-called "back doors" in their commercial hardware and software, and to bar NSA from sabotaging common encryption standards set by the government.

But the House's support of these new fixes, by a count of 293 to 123 and a huge bipartisan majority in the House, just put the pressure back on for the rest of the summer of 2014: the Senate can join the House in passing these defense budget amendments, or more likely, will now be pressured to plug in real privacy protections to America's new snooping legislation before it comes up for a vote. This all puts the White House in an even more awkward position. Does President Obama threaten a veto of the defense bill to stop this?

Little privacy in the age of big data

[Commentary] In the era of big data, the battle for privacy has already been fought and lost -- personal data is routinely collected and traded in the new economy and there are few effective controls over how it is used or secured.

Data researchers and analysts now say that it’s time for legislation to reclaim some of that privacy and ensure that any data that is collected remains secure.

“We have become the product,” says Rob Livingstone, a fellow of the University of Technology and the head of a business advisory firm.

However, Livingstone says the dilemma facing regulators is how they can regulate the collection, storage and trading of personal data on the on the Internet, when all of these activities, and the corporations themselves, operate across multiple continents and jurisdictions. The task of reclaiming some semblance of privacy is all the more urgent because the rate at which personal data is being collected is accelerating.

The buzz around big data is attracting millions of dollars of from investors and brands hoping to turn a profit, while intelligence agencies are also furiously collecting information about our online activities for much different purposes. And alongside these, there’s also the black market operators that make millions of dollars a year out of things like identity theft and matching disparate data sets across the web to help identify people who might be suitable targets for a scam.

[Porter is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor of PC Mag Australia]

Hillary Clinton backs overhaul of surveillance powers in NSA criticism

Hillary Clinton has thrown her weight behind political efforts to rein in US surveillance powers in her most forthright criticism yet of the National Security Agency (NSA).

The former secretary of state, who has hitherto largely stayed out of the debate sparked by leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, called on Congress to restore constitutional privacy protections weakened after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.

"We are finally taking stock of the laws that we passed after 9/11," she told Fox News interviewer Greta Van Susteren. "We did all of this in an a hurry because we were worried and scared and now we need to take a step back and figure out how we make sure that the balance between liberty and security is right."

Social media mass surveillance is permitted by law, says top UK official

Anyone's Google searches or use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be monitored by the security services because such "external communications" do not require individual intercept warrants, according to the government's most senior security official.

Charles Farr, director general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, has produced the first detailed justification of the UK's mass surveillance policy - developing a legal interpretation that critics say sidesteps the need for traditional intercept safeguards.

His 48 page document provoked calls for the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to be overhauled urgently and allegations that the government was exploiting loopholes in the legislation of which parliament was unaware.

The government defense was published in response to a case brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International and other civil rights groups before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which deals with complaints against the intelligence services. A full hearing will take place in July. The allegation that mass online surveillance is illegal emerged in the wake of revelations from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden about the impact of the Tempora monitoring programme operated by the UK monitoring agency GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Kickstarter links with the Guardian to highlight journalism projects

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter is putting a new focus on journalism and linking with the Guardian to highlight projects with journalistic potential.

Kickstarter will have a dedicated category for journalism projects seeking financial backing, as it already does for sectors including technology and film. At the same time the Guardian is launching a curated page on the Kickstarter site on which it will pick out noteworthy projects.

“Kickstarter’s journalism category will be a home for projects that have until now landed in other areas of the website, and it reflects our interest in helping new journalistic models thrive,” the online crowdfunding service said. “Against a backdrop of flux and confusion in the journalism business, more than $10 million has been pledged to 2,000-plus journalism, periodical, radio, and podcast projects on Kickstarter to date.”

Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance

Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.

The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on June 6, 2014. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.

The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a "nightmare scenario" that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.

Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power

In May 2013, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.

During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades.

The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change, aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's history.

"This is not how American democracy is supposed to work," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who had supported the bill but ultimately voted against it.

Senior leaders at the agency say that Snowden thrust them into a new era. James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said the intelligence agencies need to grant a greater degree of transparency or risk losing public confidence permanently. But exactly one year on, the agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data.

Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data. There are no other mandated reforms. President Barack Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans' "personal information", but that has not been codified in law.

The coalition of large Internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers’ email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort.

A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. While there have also been significant commercial changes brought by companies that fear the revelations imperiling their businesses -- Google's Gmail service broadened its use of encryption, will soon present end-to-end encryption for its Chrome browser; and after the Washington Post revealed that the NSA intercepts data transiting between Google and Yahoo storage centers, Google expanded encryption for Gmail data flowing across the Internet and Yahoo implemented default email encryption -- the bitterest disappointment has been the diminished ambitions for surveillance reform contained in the USA Freedom Act.

"That," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said, "was a very frustrating process for us."

Life sentences for serious cyberattacks are proposed in Queen's speech

The UK government has said it wants to hand out life sentences to anyone found guilty of a cyberattack that has a catastrophic effect, under plans announced in the Queen's speech.

Any hackers that manage to carry out "cyberattacks which result in loss of life, serious illness or injury or serious damage to national security, or a significant risk thereof" would face the full life sentence, according to the serious crime bill proposed in the Queen's speech.

As well as targeting cyberterrorists, the new offence in the proposed update to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 would also hand harsher sentences to those hackers carrying out industrial espionage, believed to be a growing menace affecting UK business. The law would have a maximum sentence of 14 years for attacks that create "a significant risk of severe economic or environmental damage or social disruption". Currently, the section of the CMA covering such an offence carries a 10-year sentence.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said the bill would be difficult to justify, given current laws already carry punishments for those who carry out significant acts of terrorism, whether via computers or other means. "If a supposed cyberterrorist endangers life or property, there are existing laws that can be used to prosecute them," Killock said.

Such acts have "only been seen in Hollywood movies", said Mustafa Al-Bassam, a computer science student who was convicted under the CMA for his participation in cyberattacks on companies as part of the hacktivist collective LulzSec.

The government has also not addressed complaints over the application of current computer crime law, which some in the security industry claim actually makes the Internet less safe.

John Oliver's cheeky net neutrality plea crashes FCC website

The US Federal Communications Commission website reported technical difficulties because of heavy traffic hours after comedian John Oliver called on viewers to share their thoughts with the agency about what he called “cable company fuckery.”

“We need you to get out and, for once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction,” Oliver said. “Seize your moment my lovely trolls, turn on caps lock, and fly my pretties, fly, fly!”

And, it would appear, they did. Just after the segment aired on HBO, Last Week Tonight, and its fans, said the FCC comment feature was not working. The FCC confirmed that its system was experiencing technical difficulties because of heavy traffic, after Oliver's video was posted and widely shared online.

The next day, it had been viewed nearly 800,000 times. More than 47,000 public comments have been filed on the proposal in the past thirty days. One comment blasted "cable company fuckery," using Oliver's line. Another user cited a claim made by Oliver on the show: "It is embarrassing that Estonia has higher download speeds at lower prices than the USA." One profanity-ridden post concluded with: "John Oliver told me to do this."

Reddit, Imgur and Boing Boing launch anti-NSA-surveillance campaign

Some of the world's largest websites are planning a coordinated day of action to oppose mass surveillance online. The sites, which include Reddit, Imgur and BoingBoing, will be taking part in the campaign, called "Reset the Net", in a number of ways.

Some will showing a splash screen to all users, reminiscent of the one used in the successful protests against Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, the US copyright bill which many feared would damage the backbone of the Internet.

But rather than telling users to write to their electoral representatives, this protest will push more direct action, encouraging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools. Other sites have committed to improving their own privacy as part of the campaign, by enabling standards such as HTTPS, which prevents attackers from eavesdropping on visitors.

Such security standards are common in the world of ecommerce, but rarer for sites which don't think of themselves as holding sensitive information.

The campaign is being co-ordinated by Fight for the Future, whose co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng said "Now that we know how mass surveillance works, we know how to stop it. That’s why people all over the world are going to work together to use encryption everywhere and make it too hard for any government to conduct mass surveillance.

Privacy under attack, part II: the solution is in the hands of the people

[Commentary] Edward Snowden has revealed problems for which we need solutions. The vast surveillance-industrial state that has grown up since 2001 could not have been constructed without government contractors and the data-mining industry. Both are part of a larger ecological crisis brought on by industrial overreaching.

We have failed to grasp the nature of this crisis because we have misunderstood the nature of privacy. Businesses have sought to profit from our confusion, and governments have taken further advantage of it, threatening the survival of democracy itself. The real problem is that we are losing the anonymity of reading, for which nobody has contracted at all.

We have lost the ability to read anonymously, but the loss is concealed from us because of the way we built the web. We gave people programs called "browsers" that everyone could use, but we made programs called "web servers" that only geeks could use log.

In particular, the anonymity of reading is broken by the collection of metadata. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery.

Our politics can't wait. Not in the US, where the war must end. Not around the world, where people must demand that governments fulfil the basic obligation to protect their security.

[Moglen is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is founder, director-counsel and chairman of Software Freedom Law Centre]

The NSA reform bill now shuts down a secret database. Will that fix anything?

[Commentary] A last-minute change to the National Security Agency reform bill making its way through Congress, as reported by the Guardian, may minimize one of the greatest dangers of the program.

Or it may make things far worse! Even though you may not talk to terrorists, you and a suspected terrorist may both use FedEx, so you still might have your most intimate relationships exposed to NSA’s analysis.

Right now, the NSA tries to minimize the number of innocent people whose call records get sucked up in queries by taking those voicemail and cable provider numbers out of the database. The new language in the USA Freedom Act would “require the prompt destruction of all call detail records” turned over by the telecoms “that the Government determines are not foreign intelligence information.”

If the NSA thinks you have interesting friends and relatives in China or Russia or anywhere else, it might keep your data. If it thinks you have ties to the drug trade, it might keep your data. If you work for an interesting foreign-owned company, it might keep the data. Plus, what process is the NSA going to use to decide if your phone number -- after all, it’s just a number, without a name -- is “foreign intelligence information” or not?

The NSA has to conduct some seriously intrusive analysis just to determine if your phone number amounts to foreign intelligence information! So to learn enough about your phone number to decide to destroy it, the NSA probably has to do intrusive searches on your number.

NSA to test legal limits on surveillance if USA Freedom Act becomes law

[Commentary] In a secured room beneath the US Capitol, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama Administration and the intelligence services.

The NSA, its credibility hurt by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures, is trying to reassure its overseers that it will abide by new congressional action, even as its advocates labor to shape the bill to its liking. But the agency's post-9/11 history has left the architects and advocates of the bill concerned about the ways in which it might once again reinterpret a law intended to restrain it into one allowing it more surveillance leeway than congressional architects intend.

Recent meetings between Hill aides and administration and intelligence lawyers yielded a sense of the legal reasoning likely to result if the USA Freedom Act becomes law. The NSA thinks it has not earned the public’s suspicion and has sought to assuage it since the Snowden disclosures. Its battalions of lawyers are preoccupied with restraining surveillance, veterans say, far more than they are with expanding the frontiers of the law. Still, congressional testimony has suggested that the agency will be reluctant to let legislation aimed at restricting surveillance have the final word.

The official US position on the NSA is still unlimited eavesdropping power

[Commentary] In two significant but almost-completely overlooked legal briefs, the US government defended the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Security Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 law that codified the Bush Administration's warrantless-wiretapping program.

That law permits the government to monitor Americans' international communications without first obtaining individualized court orders or establishing any suspicion of wrongdoing.

It's hardly surprising that the government believes the 2008 law is constitutional -- government officials advocated for its passage in 2008, and they have been vigorously defending the law ever since. Documents made public over the last eleven-and-a-half months by the Guardian and others show that the National Security Agency has been using the law aggressively. What's surprising -- even remarkable -- is what the government says on the way to its conclusion. It says, in essence, that the Constitution is utterly indifferent to the NSA's large-scale surveillance of Americans' international telephone calls.

The government also argues that Americans' privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a "paramount" interest in examining information that crosses international borders. And, apparently contemplating a kind of race to the bottom in global privacy rights, the government even argues that Americans can't reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries -- the government doesn't name them -- might be monitoring those communications, too.

Reform is urgently necessary, and years overdue, but this imperfect legislation would leave some of the government's most sweeping authorities intact -- and to a large extent it would leave the privacy rights, of Americans and non-Americans alike, to the mercy of the NSA. The US Congress should pass the USA Freedom Act, but this legislation must be the beginning of reform, not the end.

[Jaffer is deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy]

The US supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones -- and the NSA

[Commentary] The US Supreme Court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest?

But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place -- and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

"With computers, it's a new world," several justices reportedly said in the chamber. Are they ready to be the kinds of justices who make sense of it? Cellphones expose so much of our most personal data that the decision should be a 9-0 no-brainer.

The basic problem that makes it a harder call is that lawyers and judges are by training and habit incrementalists, while information and communications technology moves too fast for incrementalism to keep up. But this kind of narrow legalism simply cannot do when the world is changing as rapidly as it is today: all narrow analogies will systematically fail to preserve the values they did five or ten years ago, especially when we're walking around with all the metadata coming out of the bank/medical monitor/full-on GPS trackers in our pockets.

The world is changing, and that narrow view of constitutional adjudication will not offer us meaningful protection. What we need in these news cellphone cases is for those five justices to join together and show that constitutional vision is more than just the workmanlike competence of lawyers. Otherwise, the coming decades will become a series of lurches from one formally defensible but substantively implausible invasion to another, with no end in sight -- as long as there's another iPhone in the works.

The FCC is about to axe-murder net neutrality. Don't get mad -- get even

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission will say -- loud and proud – that it is fixing the open-web problem while actually letting it get worse, by providing a so-called "fast lane" for carriers to hike fees on sites trying to reach customers like you and me.

Which, inevitably, would mean you and I start paying more to use those sites -- if we aren't already.

If you live in America and believe in an open Internet, don't waste your time sinking into despair over politicians' betrayals. A little anger wouldn't hurt, but aiming it at the former cable and wireless industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler is pointless. Focus your attention on the people who he works for, and who allegedly work for you.

Start with President Barack Obama, whose unequivocal vow as a candidate to support an open Internet was as empty as so many of his other promises, if not an outright lie. Then:

  1. At the local level, push for community broadband networks, owned and operated by the public. (Waiting for Google Fiber? You might as well wait to win the lottery. Google is not your daddy, or your savior.)
  2. The telecommunications cartel has frantically worked to get state legislatures to prevent them from existing in the first place. Tell your state legislators that this is an unacceptable intrusion on your community's right to govern itself.
  3. Finally, tell your member of the US House of Representatives and your US senators that they have a job to do -- to ensure the future of innovation and free speech in a digital world. In particular, tell them that Internet access is a public utility and should be treated as such.

When the French clock off at 6pm, they really mean it

Just in case you weren't jealous enough of the French already, what with their effortless style, lovely accents and collective will to calorie control, they have now just made it illegal to work after 6pm. Well, sort of.

Après noticing that the ability of bosses to invade their employees' home lives via smartphone at any heure of the day or night was enabling real work hours to extend further and further beyond the 35-hour week the country famously introduced in 1999, workers' unions have been fighting back.

Now employers' federations and unions have signed a new, legally binding labor agreement that will require staff to switch off their phones after 6pm.

Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, Deloitte and PwC), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones -- or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. And companies must ensure that their employees come under no pressure to do so.

NSA performed warrantless searches on Americans' calls and emails -- Clapper

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "backdoor" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.

The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases. Now, in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time this backdoor had been used in practice to search for data related to “US persons.”

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter. “These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

The legal authority to perform the searches, revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, was denounced by Sen Wyden as a “backdoor search loophole.” Clapper did not disclose how many such searches had been performed by the NSA.

Yahoo, Google and Apple also claim right to read user emails

Microsoft is not unique in claiming the right to read users' emails -- Apple, Yahoo and Google all reserve that right as well.

The broad rights e-mail providers claim for themselves has come to light following Microsoft's admission that it read a journalist's Hotmail account in an attempt to track down the source of an internal leak. But most webmail services claim the right to read users' email if they believe that such access is necessary to protect their property. But other major email providers reserve exactly the same rights.

Yahoo requires users to "acknowledge, consent and agree that Yahoo may access… your account information and Content… in a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect the rights… of Yahoo." Google's terms require the user to "acknowledge and agree that Google may access… your account information and any Content associated with that account… in a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect against imminent harm to the… property… of Google". Apple "may, without liability to you, access… your Account information and Content… if we have a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect the… property… of Apple".

US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency's top lawyer insists

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies -- both for the Internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the Internet.

Asked during a hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the FISA Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.” De explained: “Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,” De said. “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process that any recipient company would receive.”

After the hearing, De added that service providers also know and receive legal compulsions surrounding NSA’s harvesting of communications data not from companies but directly in transit across the Internet under 702 authority.

How the US intelligence community attempts to rebrand itself -- on Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the centerpieces of the intelligence community’s attempts at rebranding in the wake of what it considers a crisis wrought by Edward Snowden: a web clearinghouse of formerly classified documents related to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance authorities, an exercise in transparency.

But the documents on the site are most often presented without a critical disclosure. While statements accompanying them refer to decisions by director James Clapper and other administration officials to release the surveillance-related information, nearly all the instances of such declassification – eight out of 12 – came to be published only after the government lost transparency cases, a fact that the Tumblr, known as IC On The Record, most often omits or obscures.