> Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports"

That's because it contains wiretapping data of specific highly valuable targets. Nowhere in this sentence does it say that it contains mass surveillance because Snowden's documents and the government have shown it does not.

I never said that the NSA doesn't engage in mass surveillance, only that it doesn't do mass wiretapping through Verizon and AT&T or through the Internet companies, as you wrongly believed PRISM did. The reason that distinction matters is that the NSA absolutely should gobble up all communications in a war zone or other foreign area threatening national security. That's what it's there for. Gobbling up and processing domestic communications as your claimed mass wiretapping on Verizon or Google would do is outside the scope of the intelligence agencies, and there remains no evidence that they do that despite multiple leaks. Any claim otherwise is conspiracy theory by definition.

I never said PRISM was the same program that engaged in mass surveillance.

I also never mentioned Google. Your arguments keep starting off by strawmanning my own.

But sure let's talk about Google. You really think Schmidt and friends are clean on this? He is a globalist authoritarian lap dog.

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

And you're also fundamentally confused about something. See, the NSA does not need direct access to all of this data. They allow/encourage/force various companies to comply with certain data collection and retention practices, and tap into this data when necessary. Why? So that people like you can claim they are not directly surveying their citizens.

All of the data still exists, and is accessed when needed.

It's like if my friend spied on you and reported back to me whenever I asked, but then I come out and say, "Hey mister, I'm not spying on you. I only ask my friend about things necessary to my investigation. If you're being a good dog then this shouldn't even bother you."

> I never said PRISM was the same program that engaged in mass surveillance.

You started off by saying you knew about PRISM because the NSA is building a large datacenter in Utah just to hold PRISM's data.

> I also never mentioned Google.

I never claimed you did. You claimed that PRISM ingested mass wiretapping data. That data would come from Google and other Internet companies according to the documents. My point was that your belief that it is illegally gobbling up all the communications done on Google's and other Internet companies' communications products is baseless.

I'm going to ignore your warping of my words and focus on the interesting bit here: again, Google.

You don't remember when news broke in 2014 that the NSA was snooping on Google's Gmail traffic that was flying around unencrypted within their own network? Google, rightfully embarrassed, subsequently enabled internal end-to-end encryption after the news broke.

Here it is straight from the horse's mouth: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...

So... yeah. Not baseless at all. Meanwhile you have yet to provide a single citation throughout all of this.

I cited Snowden's own documents.

According to Snowden's documents, the NSA used email envelope metadata where at least one side was a foreigner to build a connection graph, similar to pen register metadata collection. It didn't look at the contents, which it would have to do in order to be wiretapping. That program (STELLARWIND, which operated behind the Internet companies' backs, not PRISM, which operated via court orders on specific accounts) ended before Snowden even leaked it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/27/ns...

Let's recap. You claimed that PRISM is mass wiretapping. It isn't. You claimed that the NSA is mass wiretapping Verizon and AT&T. It isn't. Let's stick to your original claims and see them through to completion. Do you admit you were wrong about PRISM and the telcos?

Citing Snowden's documents would involve actually giving me a link.

I did not say PRISM was mass wiretapping but it is indeed part of the surveillance suite of NSA programs. I did not adequately explain myself in my original post, but I cleared things up afterwards and you are ignoring that completely. You have consistently been framing my arguments in a specific way so that you can attack them in a specific way.

I also don't understand why you think that the NSA was not mass wiretapping both of those telco's major junctions. It's a known thing. It's not some fringe conspiracy theory. The Fed has been tapping phone lines since the very beginning. Not all of them sure, but certainly in a dragnet fashion. This has continued with the explosive growth of information networks into the 21st century. I provided links. I do not need to provide any more on that topic.

I've honestly never encountered someone before who so earnestly believes as you do that these programs are not widespread or dangerous or grossly overstepping their bounds. It's like denying climate change or something.

> Citing Snowden's documents would involve actually giving me a link.

I gave you a link to a slide diagramming PRISM and a link to the document describing the email envelope program that had shut down.

> I did not say PRISM was mass wiretapping but it is indeed part of the surveillance suite of NSA programs.

I understand you now concede that PRISM isn't the nefarious new-datacenter-requiring mass data collection you originally claimed it was, that the actual surveillance itself is carried out by the FBI, and that PRISM just enables the NSA to search the FBI's data collected on specific foreigners with a court order.

> I also don't understand why you think that the NSA was not mass wiretapping both of those telco's major junctions. It's a known thing.

If it's a "known thing," where is the evidence? None of your links claim that the NSA is mass wiretapping the telcos' major junctions. Mass wiretapping Americans would violate the Fourth Amendment (the ACLU successfully sued over phone metadata collection, and collecting voice content would be a much bigger issue), so if you have any evidence at all, present it or be prepared to be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Here you are again, twisting my words! Amazing. No, I did not say anything like that about PRISM. I said exactly what I said-- that I was not clear enough in my original post, but I clarified myself immediately after in response to you. I wrote that original post in a hurry and did not take the time to read over it like I usually do. And I've already elaborated on how the NSA uses other agencies and businesses as tools for its surveillance, to avoid direct ownership of the information that they can request at any time. Again, STOP twisting my words to serve your narrative.

I gave you links, but I will humor you with another:

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

> . . . recently published FISA court order demanding Verizon turn over all customer phone records including who is talking to whom, when and for how long—to the NSA . . .

Oh look! FISA being used to demand all of verizon's phone records! All of them! And what are one of the programs that FISA feeds into? Oh yeah, that's right. PRISM. If you do not consider this to be a dragnet surveillance order, you are just lying to yourself. So there is yet another verifiable source highlighting the scope of PRISM.

here is the relevant court case:

https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles...

Do I need to physically take you to Titanpointe to see it for yourself? Here is a link explaining what that is, I already posted it once but clearly you have not been following through and reading these links.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...

> FISA being used to demand all of verizon's phone records! All of them! And what are one of the programs that FISA feeds into? Oh yeah, that's right. PRISM

This explicitly isn't PRISM, and this isn't ongoing. Moreover, Snowden's documents showed that this data wasn't used for surveillance. The data was anonymized and a system (not PRISM) was built on top of it that could only perform a limited set of graph queries to find associates of known threats to national security. To deanonymize a node, the government would have to request another court order.

You have once again demonstrated that you don't know what PRISM is, so is it any wonder that I keep calling you out on it?

What isn't PRISM? FISA? No shit. I said it feeds into PRISM. And I did not say it is ongoing. And I think you have a warped view of what surveillance is because a system used to query networks and other identifying information is a dragnet surveillance tool. You just refuse to be wrong here.

And a lot of the hooplah about these immoral dragnet tools is not only the fact that they partially target American citizens (after NSA executives said under oath, in very particular terms, that they do not collect files on American citizens) is that it was being accessed by employees without court orders.

Pre 9/11, maybe you could have made a case about this "anonymization" being legitimate. There were certainly programs in the work that attempted to incorporate homomorphic encryption into their design. But these have been gutted and reformed into what we have today.

You have to wonder, what are these tools being used for? They certainly haven't been publicly attributed to stopping any terrorist activities. If you don't think these systems, put in place by spy agencies with the legal ability to lie about their internal operations, are being used to spy on their targets (which is the general public) then what the hell do you think they are for?

> I said it feeds into PRISM.

It doesn't. That's my point. How many more times are you going to show that you don't know what PRISM is while claiming that you do?

Also, surveillance is, by definition, close observation. Merely having anonymized phone metadata is not surveillance any more than having access to Google Maps satellite imagery without any other data sources to join to. More specifically, it isn't mass wiretapping, which as you recall was your original claim that you have yet to substantiate, instead pointing to this metadata program that I had earlier used to show you that no evidence exists for mass wiretapping of Americans.

> PRISM is the program that brings the FBI's FISA electronic communication wiretaps into the NSA's databases

> It doesn't.

> Merely having anonymized phone metadata is not surveillance

OK. Not only are you inconsistent but your arguments are based around ill-defined terminology. Goodbye now.

How have I been inconsistent? I've repeatedly stated that collecting phone call metadata isn't wiretapping. Wiretapping is well-defined and requires collecting the content of conversations.

Surveillance != wiretapping. MYSTIC is the wiretapping program I was referring to. Only MYSTIC. It is indeed wiretapping because they recorded calls and SMS.

You are difficult to argue with because you continue to either misinterpret or warp my words. Goodbye now.

You originally claimed that the NSA was performing mass wiretapping on AT&T and Verizon. MYSTIC has nothing to do with those companies or with Americans, as I've already stated.

It appears that you finally agree both that PRISM isn't mass wiretapping and that AT&T and Verizon aren't being mass wiretapped. Good. You appear to have learned something even if you now claim to have known all along.

Listen. I said "mass wiretapping" and "exploitation" thru vehicles like AT&T and Verizon. And then in a separate paragraph I spoke about PRISM. At no point did I call PRISM a wiretapping program. And it is 100% accurate that the NSA and other agencies have wiretapped targets, many targets, through telecoms. I also provided you with various citations showing different government surveillance programs and their various forms of reach. Understand what I am saying here. I have not waivered in my position once.

Stop fucking putting words in my mouth.

You've just got to get your last word in to frame the conversation in a way that doesn't give you cognitive dissonance, don't you? OK. Go ahead and have it. Claim I am saying whatever you want me to say.

This argument has been wholly destructive and not the least bit constructive, because you constantly derail it at every turn and put me in a position of defending the same thing over and over instead of covering new ground. This is a common tactic used by authoritarian and conservative types across the world and I don't have time to play ball.

Have fun, kid.

OK, given what you claim to have known all along, what do you find bad about what they're doing? Everything you now say you've known all along is perfectly legal and what a spy agency is supposed to do.