Overflight, 93

«There’s an infrastructure in place in the United States, and worldwide, that NSA has built, in cooperation with other governments as well, that intercepts basically every digital communication, every radio communication, every analogue communication that it has sensors in place to detect, and with these capabilities basically the vast majority of human and computer to computer communications, device based communications, which sort of form the relationships between humans are automatically ingested without targeting, and that allows individuals to retroactively search your communications based on self certifications. So, for example, if I wanted to see the content of your e−mail, your wife’s phone calls, anything like that, all I have to do is use what they call a "selector": any kind of thing in the communications chain that might uniquely or almost uniquely identify you as an individual: and I’m talking about things like e−mail addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, even passwords that are unique to you that aren’t used by anyone else, I could input those into the system, and it would not only go back through the database and go, ‘have I seen this anywhere in the past?’, it would basically put an additional level of scrutiny on it, moving into the future, that says, ‘if this is detected now or anytime in the future I want this to go to me immediately’ and alert me in real time that you’re communicating with someone or things like that.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, journalists
«Actually, given your geographic familiarity with the UK I’d like to point out that GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters, author’s note] has probably the most invasive network intercept program anywhere in the world. It’s called Tempora, T E M P O R A, and it’s the world’s first "full−take", they call it, that means content in addition to metadata on everything.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill