New NSA slides explain PRISM at work

Rappler.com

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The Washington Post releases new slides showing how PRISM works and what information it gets from whom

PRISM'S TASKING PROCESS. The slide outlines how an NSA request for data using PRISM works. Screen shot from The Washington Post

MANILA, Philippines – The Washington Post released 4 new slides from the US National Security Agency (NSA) over the weekend, with these slides going over how PRISM, the US intelligence community’s clandestine surveillance program, operates.

The slides describe the process by which an NSA analyst “tasks” PRISM to give him information on a surveillance target. According to the slide, requests to add a target to PRISM go through a supervisor. Supervisors review the search terms and then endorse the “reasonable belief” of the analyst requesting the task. Reasonable belief here is defined as 51 percent confidence that a specified target is a foreign national who is overseas when the information is collected.

CASE NOTATIONS. This slide explains how cases are filed, in addition to outlining what data is collected. Screen shot from The Washington Post

The information collected is then analyzed and given a case notation. According to the slides, the data gathered seem to include stored communications, chat, as well as email, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conversations, forum messages videos and online social network information, such as photos and wall posts.

Noticeable in the new slides is a mention of the collection of real-time status updates, specifically real-time notifications of email events, sent messages, chat logins and logout events.

Despite the breadth of information collected, annotations from the report also note how the collection of information is reportedly filtered to “reduce the intake of information about Americans.”

The last slide in the update notes a given number of active surveilance targets in the PRISM database: 117,675. As The Washington Post notes, “The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected ‘incidentally’ during surveillance of those targets.” – Rappler.com

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