Shades of Edward Snowden…..
P.R.I.S.M. Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management is the official name for the collection of information about everyone. It’s called PRISM because that name, that word cleanses it of it’s 1984/Big Brother origins and nature. It’s unconstitutionality and the moral failure of a government that was instituted to protect the right to privacy but now willfully violates it. PRISM is the system that the National Security Agency uses to gain access to the private communications of private individuals. The ACLU notes: “PRISM is a warrantless wiretapping program that operates around the clock, vacuuming up emails, Facebook messages, Google chats, Skype calls, and the like. Government agents do not review all of the information in real-time — there’s simply too much of it. Instead, the communications are pooled together and stored in massive NSA, FBI, and CIA databases that can be searched through for years to come, using querying tools that allow the government to extract and examine huge amounts of private information. We know some access is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 2008. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tacitly admitted PRISM’s existence in a blog post.
A classified PowerPoint presentation revealed by Edward Snowden states PRISM enables “collection directly from the servers” of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other online companies. That’s an unconstitutional surveillance program under which the NSA, FBI, and CIA illegally and unconstitutionally search through Americans’ international emails, internet calls, and chats without obtaining a warrant then store the collected information. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM in 2013, the program included at least nine major internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple, and Skype. Today, it very likely includes an even broader set of companies. PRISM aprovides a backdoor into Americans’ private communications, violating the Fourth Amendment on a massive scale. We don’t know the total number of Americans affected, even today, because the government has refused to provide any estimate.
This type of unjustifiable secrecy has also helped the program evade public judicial review of its legality because the government almost never tells people that it spied on them without a warrant. Indeed, the government has a track record of failing to tell Americans about this spying even when the person is charged with a crime based on the surveillance. That’s one reason why this case is so important — this time, the government has admitted to the spying.
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