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Thursday's lead, with a hat tip to The Guardian and columnist Glenn Greenwald, was the confirmation, via a leaked search warrant, that the NSA has been compiling a database of logs of every single telephone call made across every domestic network for the past seven years. The next revelation, courtesy of The Guardian again and also Washington Post, is the confirmation, courtesy of a leaked NSA PowerPoint presentation, that its PRISM program monitors global Internet traffic -- including e-mails, chatrooms, videos, and images -- by tapping into corporate Internet servers. NBC's Pete Williams named the companies whose databanks are under scrutiny: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. CBS' Nancy Cordes filed a profile of Greenwald, complete with satellite-feed soundbites.
CBS' in-house ex-spook John Miller told us on Thursday that PRISM was used to foil a 2009 plot against the New York City subways system by a Queens NY resident names Najibullah Zazi. Now, ABC's Brian Ross and CBS' David Martin also give credit to PRISM for the same plot-foiling success.
NBC's Pete Williams cited the defense of the two NSA programs by President Barack Obama and his aides: "We are not listening to your phone calls or reading your e-mails." On the first claim, Williams explained that the database was analyzing the logs of telephone calls not their content; the NSA was not data-mining, but searching the database after detecting a pattern of calls, which sounds like a distinction without a difference. He quoted a soundbite from MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports: "If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, you need a haystack."
On the Presidential second reassurance, "your" appears to be the operative word: yes, international e-mails may be read; so the "your" refers to you people here in this country, whose domestic Internet traffic is not intentionally read. "The key word here is intentionally," commented CBS' Martin, conceding that it may end up being read, after all, in passing. ABC's Ross disagreed: he stated that the NSA does not read Internet traffic, it analyzes it instead, running an algorithm across content, just as Google does with Gmail.
On Thursday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Brian Ross had both replayed that soundbite in which Director James Clapper was caught in a lie while testifying to Congress. No, Clapper stated while scratching his head, the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans. Significantly, CBS omitted that quote. Now John Miller, CBS' in-house expert, shares that when he was a spy his boss happened to be Clapper himself. "He abhors leaks," declared Miller, envisioning a searing inquisition of FBI grilling, polygraph tests, and grand jury testimony, as a result of The Guardian's scoop. Clapper, it appears, does not abhor lies as much.
So what are we to make of all this? NBC's John Yang surveyed the vox pop on life in a surveillance society. #NSA is trending, he assured us.
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