Overflight, 94

«The primary purpose of the second archive is to bring the focus over to SSO as opposed to PRISM. This is in general. SSO are the Special Source Operations: there’s this worldwide passive collection on networks, both domestic to the U.S. and international. There’s a lot of different ways they do it, but corporate partnerships are one of the primary things: they do it domestically, they also do this with the multinationals that might be headquartered in the USA, in a kind of coerce or just pay and they give them access. And they also do it bilaterally with the assistance of certain governments. And that’s basically on the premise that, ‘All right, we’ll help you set the system up if you give us all the data from it.’ XKEYSCORE is the front−end system that analysts use for querying that [… undiscernible expression, author’s note] ocean about all of that stuff where you can do that retroactive searches, live searches, and get flaggings, and all that. … As of fiscal year 2011 they could monitor one billion telephone and internet sessions simultaneously for one of these devices. And they could collect at a rate of about 125 Gigabytes a second. That’s for each one of these, yeah. Back then, there were twenty sites; there’s ten at DOD (Department Of Defence, author’s note) installations; but these are all outdated, we expanded pretty rapidly. But so, twenty sites that’s at least twenty billion.» Edward Snowden, commenting his documents with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
«This is CNN Breaking News. An explosive new report is re−igniting the concerns that your privacy is being violated to protect the America’s "security". It reveals a Court Order giving the National Security Agency a blanket access to millions of Verizon customer records on a daily basis. Early I had a chance to conduct the first TV interview with the reporter who broke the story wide open: Glenn Greenwald, of The Guardian. Explain for all the viewers why this is important.