| What really makes me suspicious is this passage: > “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” said the “career intelligence officer” who gave documents describing PRISM to the Washington Post. Think of the engineering needed at multiple endpoints to allow something like this...I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)? I'm only being slightly pedantic here. If this is "literally" possible, then the amount of work needed for the collaborating companies is non-trivial. It's one thing to pass along uber-authentication credentials allowing an NSA-agent Zuckerberg-like privileges...that could be something implemented with as few as a couple people. But to bake in something right out of a hacker movie? It just makes a few of the claims sound a bit suspect...because what is terribly frightening is the government's ability to aggregate and analyze this information in bulk, not to peep in on you as you're typing in real-time, which would be one of the least efficient ways ever to spy on the general American public's online activity. And no, I'm not being an apologist for federal expansion of powers. I'm pointing out that some of what this source is leaking seems to be beyond reality, not because of technological sophistication, but because of the number of mundane moving parts and actors that would seemingly have to be involved (theoretically, wouldn't they have to have as many datacenters as all the companies they're vacuuming from?). The entire PowerPoint slide set looks like something a get-rich-quick contractor would whip up to win a fat contract that would never actually be scrutinized for viability. But still, even if the government doesn't actually have the capability as described, it is wrong for them to not disavow it...it's not any good if their mindset is: "Oh we're not doing that...yet...but we would love to, some day) |