For an inside look at some of the ways the U.S. National Security Agency uses vast stores of telephone data as a foundation for mass surveillance of the American people, check out an excerpt from Barton Gellman’s book on Edward Snowden in Wired.
The article highlights three important shifts in surveillance practices in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. First, to develop a global view of contacts the data gathering began to include the U.S. population. Second, the data gathering transitioned from targeted surveillance to mass surveillance. Third, to reduce the time to examine a surveillance target, the massive database was subjected to “precomputation” to establish the contact relationships in advance of any request.
What could possibly go wrong?
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