I'd recommend checking out the article and other reading on PRISM. PRISM is operated by the NSA and involves egregious breaches of personal privacy including bulk collection of loosely targeted data, warrantless data retrieval in some instances, the collection and use of "inadvertently collected data" and more. This entire period of extreme surveillance and secret courts, which are in effect kangaroo courts, will likely be looked at in the history books similar to how you look at things like the Stasi. Keep in mind that the Stasi was founded in 1950 and prosecutions only began once East Germany fell, some 40 years later.

> PRISM is operated by the NSA and involves egregious breaches of personal privacy including bulk collection of loosely targeted data, warrantless data retrieval in some instances, the collection and use of "inadvertently collected data" and more.

No, according to Snowden's documents, PRISM is a data processing system that consumes data sent to the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit following a Section 702 order for communications sent to or from a specific foreign user not in the US.

https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...

I would avoid basing your knowledge on blogs.

The wiki page's synopsis are contradictory as usual, but the original images as well as Snowden's comments are not ambiguous. The slides show real time access to video, voice, VOIP, etc.

Snowden's synopsis was, "In general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."

Quoting Greenwald who received the information and disclosure directly from Snowden: "...even low-level NSA analysts are allowed to search and listen to the communications of Americans and other people without court approval and supervision." Greenwald said low level Analysts can, via systems like PRISM, "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."

> The slides show real time access to video, voice, VOIP, etc.

For the specific users whose data was requested in the Section 702 request.

> Quoting Greenwald who received the information and disclosure directly from Snowden: "...even low-level NSA analysts are allowed to search and listen to the communications of Americans and other people without court approval and supervision."

Funny how Snowden didn't have any evidence of this. All his documents match the description I gave you. The FBI's DITU is right there in the system diagram slide. This is just a misunderstanding of the documents by a low-level sysadmin who never actually saw the programs and a credulous reporter who didn't even try to check his facts.