google, youtube, yahoo! and five other big names. in short, a direct line into your online life. the fbi, national security agency are doing it, according to a report in the washington post and britain s guardian newspaper, they have been doing it for the last six years. part of a highly classified, never before disclosed intelligence gathering program code named prism. according to the reporting it began during the bush administration but has grown sharply, exponentially, during the obama years. the fbi and nsa vacuuming up your e-mails, online pictures, audio, video, by tapping directly into the servers of those five companies i mentioned, plus microsoft, pal talk, aol, skype, apple and soon, according to the post dropbox. the post and guardian reporting that prism use the data feed as raw material for a massive data mining operation aimed at spotting patterns that might provide early warning of a terrorist attack.
plugging directly into facebook, google, youtube, yahoo! and five other big names. in short, a direct line into your online life. the fbi, national security agency are doing it, according to a report in the washington post and britain s guardian newspaper, they have been doing it for the last six years. part of a highly classified, never before disclosed intelligence gathering program code named prism. according to the reporting it began during the bush administration but has grown sharply, exponentially, during the obama years. the fbi and nsa vacuuming up your e-mails, online pictures, audio, video, by tapping directly into the servers of those five companies i mentioned, plus microsoft, pal talk, aol, skype, apple and soon, according to the post dropbox. the post and guardian reporting that prism use the data feed as raw material for a massive data mining operation aimed at spotting patterns that might provide early warning of a terrorist attack. as we said, it comes hard on t
raw material for a massive data mining operation aimed at spotting patterns that might provide early warning of a terrorist attack. as we said, it comes hard on the heels of the revelation the guardian newspaper and elsewhere that must be giving any one of the tens of millions of americans who use a verizon cell phone a chill. word that the fbi and nsa asked for and got a secret court order giving them acss to phone records for all verizon cell phone calls, foreign, domestic and local. not the conversations themselves, just everything else that s identifiable. white house officials neither confirming nor denying the story but they are defending the practice of data collection for national security purposes. again, both these programs have their roots in the prior administrations but have grown immensely since then, leading the huffington post today to run a composite photo under the headline, george w. obama. it s turning partisan politics on its head with a number of democrats slammin
07 and 08. but once salon reporter steve conracki started spotting patterns dale, not only is he in year, the exact same spot he is in every year. it did raise an interesting question. in a chamber with this many seats, how do you get those few seats on the center aisle where the spotlight may shine? get there early. if you want to get a seat there, you have to get there early. reporter: that s right. it is open seating for the state of the union. and by early i mean, you know, more than ten hours early. and then ten hours later, when the president finally comes in, maybe you re on tv for three seconds. reporter: ten hours for three seconds? what s that calculation? say, new york s eliot engel, another top fiver on salon s list, visible in 2003, 04, 05, 06, 08 and 10. here s what engel was doing at 8:30 this morning. he had found the place on the aisle where he wants to be tonight.