Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The New Scandal is Called PRISM

Its history, in which President Obama presided over �exponential growth� in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.

The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company�s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in �selectors,� or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target�s �foreignness.� That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, �but it�s nothing to worry about.�