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Showing posts from June, 2013

Is PRISM just a not-so-secret web tool?

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(Updated with an infographic on June 30, 2013) Since The Guardian first published about the PRISM data collection program on June 6, there have been new disclosures of top secret documents almost every day, resulting in some fierce protests against apparently illegal wiretapping by the NSA and GCHQ. However, it remains unclear what PRISM actually is or does, as The Guardian didn't provide any new details or disclosed more than 5 of the 41 presentation slides about the program. This makes it hard to determine whether PRISM really is the illegal or at least embarrassing program which most people now think it is. Especially, because it could even be the hardly secret Planning tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM), which is a web-based tool to manage information requests widely used by the US military. Here we will take a closer look at this program and try to determine whether this could be the same as the PRISM revealed by The Guardian. > The la

Abbreviations, Acronyms, Nicknames and Codewords

The communications security and intelligence branch is notorious for its abbreviations, acronyms, nicknames and codewords, and recently we learned a number of new NSA codewords from many classified documents which Edward Snowden handed over to The Guardian. Here we provide two listings, one of abbreviations and acronyms, and one of nicknames and codewords, to get somewhat more grip on these things: - Abbreviations and Acronyms - Nicknames and Codewords Listings like this can never be complete, and therefore expect new entries to be added gradually, as well as updates of existing entries.

Are the NSA's PRISM slides photoshopped?

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(Updated: June 10, 2013) Yesterday, Thursday June 6, The Washington Post and The Guardian came with a breaking news story about a Top Secret NSA program called PRISM , which reportedly collects data directly from the servers of nine major internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype and Apple. Many of these firms have already denied that the government has access to their networks. Today both president Obama and director of National Intelligence James Clapper said there is no gathering of information about US citizens or of any person located within the United States. > The latest information: What is known about NSA's PRISM program The Guardian claimed to have obtained 41 slides of an NSA presentation about the PRISM collection program, and showed some of them on its website. But some strange looking details caused a number of people, especially on Twitter, think the slides might be fake. Here we take a more close look at these slides, which, if genuine, give