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NSA surveillance 101: What US intelligence agencies are doing, what they know

US intelligence agencies are gathering massive amounts of US telephone calling data and social media data on both foreigners and citizens. Here are seven questions and answers about what is known so far.

What is PRISM?

Alan Brandt/Facebook/AP
This photo shows the server room at Facebook's data center in Prineville, Ore. The revelations that the National Security Agency is snooping on the digital communications stored by nine major Internet services illustrate how aggressively personal data is being collected and analyzed.

Terrorists know that communicating by phone is dangerous for them. So they have shifted to the Internet. Thus, the NSA now hunts for terrorist threats hidden in the flood of social media data, leaked documents show.

PRISM (for Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management) collects digital photos, stored data, file transfers, e-mail, chat services, videos, and video conferencing from nine Internet companies, according to a “top secret” NSA document describing the program and posted on the Washington Post website. By law, the program is confined to “foreign targets located outside the United States,” says a statement by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Internet data have been provided under a government order by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, according to the leaked NSA document. While the telephone metadata program was widely known in Congress, PRISM’s existence seemed to take many lawmakers by surprise.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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