It is called XKeyscore. They collect all of it and if an analyst wants to look at everything you do for any reason, he or she can. They don't need a warrant or authorization from that toothless bag of wind known as the FISA court.
All they have to do is fill out some bullshit form that nobody ever looks at. Lord help you if you're in a messy divorce and your spouse's second cousin's lover happens to work at the NSA or a related contractor.
The vast amount of data that the NSA can collect is the reason why they are building a server farm the size of a small city out in the wastelands of Utah. They want to keep it all, forever.
Markus Wolf would be green with envy if he were still alive.
We are about at the point where you should keep in mind that everything you do or say online should be treated as though it was appearing on one of those huge LCD billboards next to a highway.
And of course, the pro-police state caucus up on Capitol Hill will see nothing wrong with any of this.
UPDATE: Seconds before a hearing in the Senate, the MTAHNS declassified and released a FISA court order and some other documents. So they can say they're being "transparent" and yet not allow the Senators any time to read the damn things.
Also, note that with regard the claim that "wiretapping everyone foiled X terrorist plots", the number represented by X keeps decreasing.
UPDATE II: Per one of the comments, Google wrote a lot of the software that the NSA is using to spy on everyone. So Google's motto has morphed from "Don't Be Evil" to "Evil, Inc.".
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And the thing is, they don't understand what they're spying on while they're spying on it. In the 2000's I was working at a food warehouse and I saw an article in a trade mag we subscribed to. It was by a produce importer who had a multi-truck shipment of apples stopped and impounded for three days at the Canadian border while they searched every box. The article was a heads up to anyone making business phone calls out of the country, as the importer had made several calls to Canadian growers prior to placing his order to inquire about an apple disease called "water core" that was bad that year. He said that as an importer, he had reliable info about border crossing procedures, and the only difference he could think of to call attention to that shipment were those phone calls. He said the only people who needed to be scared of water core were produce dealers who regularly lose money to it, and had the spooks known this it could have saved a major pain in the ass, as apples are shipped in boxes on wrapped pallets. And refrigerated also. And there was the uncompensated time for the truck drivers, damage to the apples through mishandling, etc. You know, real world stuff that they don't seem to care much about.
-Doug in Oakland
Basically, if it is email, it is being saved and archived. If it can be read by Google's web crawling robot, it is being saved and archived. If it is a text message being sent either via the phone company or via any online service, it is being saved and archived. And I will tell you a secret -- a lot of the software they're using to do this was purchased from Google and other Silicon Valley vendors, who do this themselves to all their customers. Every word you send through Gmail is being read by Google's robots, who are mining it for data to figure out better ways to target ads to you and your friends, for example.
Welcome to the surveillance state, where not only is the NSA spying on you -- but so is everybody else you do business with.
- Badtux the Surveillance Penguin
(Now back to setting up a cloud farm for gathering surveillance camera data, sigh).
Did you see the couple that researched pressure cookers and backpacks separately, and has SWAT come by for a visit? The time is Now.
w3ski
w3ski, I tracked that down and put it up on the blog.
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