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You can continue to David Sternlight it all you want, the government was still Hoovering up all the metadata for every phone call in the United States from most carriers, and they were tapping the major email providers and Hoovering up all the metadata AND content. No, I don't remember what the different programs were called. Sure, they weren't supposed to look at that data unless it was within some number of hops of some targeted party, but they took it all anyway.
As for the statutory authorizations, they were black programs and their replacements are almost certainly black. There's no statutory line item for PRISM or XKEYSCORE any more than there was for the SR-71, and there won't be for the replacements either.
The propaganda here is by those pretending this isn't a big deal. Of course, such mass surveillance programs have been leaked before -- ECHELON and the program behind AT&T Room 641A (the one that Joseph Naccio went to jail for not playing ball with). In a few years everyone forgets and is shocked when the next such program leaks.
I'll just jump in here to say that this is the first outright false thing in this comment. The rest of your comment is just admitting to the truth of my comment. You don't actually know the differences; you don't actually know how they worked; you don't know the follow-on history, how the statutes changed, etc.
This was a close second to being outright false. Actually, I'll probably say that it's outright false. You could make modifications to it to be true, but as stated, it's outright false.
Look, I'm not pretending it isn't a big deal. Of course it's a big deal. That's why you should put in the effort to understand it instead of continuing to be false false false.
Are you sure? I would love to see the congressional budget that funded PRISM. I genuinely don't see how there could be one for a classified program like this. My understanding has just been that NSA gets $XXX billion in the budget with nothing else said.
PRISM is the name of one of the major components of FISA Section 702. This is public law. I don't believe the claim was that the budget is public. After all, the sentence immediately prior in the original comment was:
That speaks specifically about authorizations (which FISA Section 702 is), not appropriations.
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They were intercepting the lines between the Google front end servers and the GMail backends to get all the data out in the clear. That they then pretended they didn't see the stuff that didn't relate to a targeted individual doesn't mean they didn't have it. They use a very non-standard definition of the term "collected" to claim they didnt "collect" the data that didn't relate to targeted individuals, but they went through all of it.
Facts not in evidence. We've been over this. There was one slide, where this was presented as an idea. There was none of the information you would have expected on a slide like that about implementation details, authorities, measurement of flows, nothing. We have literally zero actual evidence that they actually did this. It is entirely possible that they did do this, but we just frankly don't know. If they did do this, it would not likely be related to the two major programs that were controversial from Snowden leaks, if, ya know, you had any understanding whatsoever of how those programs worked. Showing again that you don't know anything about these programs and are just free-associating.
I'm not sure which actual claim this is referring to, because it's too vague. You might be trying for something that was real, but I can't tell, because you're again just free-associating rather than speaking about any genuine knowledge of the leaks or the law or literally any real, actual information that we have.
This, I believe, is pretty much just false. They have a pretty clear definition of when they "collect" information, and they're pretty clear that they do collect information from people who aren't the targeted individual. They talk about this very explicitly.
You just have literally zero clue how any of this works, because you've persistently refused to educate yourself at all. It's really really really obvious and really bad. The last time we did this, I painstakingly forced you to the point of demonstrating that you were capable of downloading a document (yay! you can use a computer!), but you immediately went on to demonstrate that you were incapable of reading it.
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