Those two are literally the same. The former is worse even, since there is no escaping from it - one way or the other they will get your data over some service you used or had to use at a point in history. The latter can be avoided in many ways.
Like, you may not like the idea that the police can serve warrants, or that there are NSLs or a FISA court, but the agency was very much following the rules there. Rules can be challenged in court, rules can be changed.
All because he couldn't understand basic concepts spelled out in the documents he had access to (and had failed a test on those concepts not very long before, so the fact that he didn't understand them wasn't news to him). Now he's here again telling us about the future of money without understanding how any of it works.
In a single year 702 was used to collect 250 million American communications (https://www.brennancenter.org/media/140/download). Yes individual foreigners and foreign groups are certified (in an annual hearing, technically for a bulk warrant, at a secret court no one is allowed to attend). But 702 goes hops out from the original target to people they talk to and the people those people talk to. “Incidental” collection on Americans is expressly allowed. The FBI routinely uses 702 collection to build cases against Americans. It is a staggering program.
>Snowden thought it allowed the NSA to read anybody’s email
- source please.
> causing Snowden to panic and bring in the undereducated Greenwald
First of all, the “undereducated” part is a strange assertion because it’s well established that Greenwald went to NYU law and worked for the prestigious white shoe firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz afterward. He had also at that point been writing (for the Guardian, Salon) specifically about NSA surveillance for many years. By what measure is an NYU trained lawyer with years of experience as a legal and surveillance journalist “undereducated?”
But also, the Washington Post has itself reported that Gellman’s contact with Snowden began in May 2013 - Greenwald has said his started in February. So the timeline does not add up here. Even in the piece you link he acknowledges working with another journalist Snowden worked with (Poitras) at the time he was trying to persuade his editor to publish the first story.
> he shared information with the Chinese governmen
This is false and defamatory (and invites a lawsuit, although you’re picking on someone who faces shall we say challenges defending himself this way). Snowden has repeatedly denied this totally baseless bad faith assertion (eg https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/10/snowde...) and the article you link shows just the opposite - that he provided information openly to journalists (SCMP was famously independent at the time though that sadly changed years later)
It turns out that targeted wiretaps of some non-US citizens living outside the US who are believed to have foreign intelligence value is useful for reports. Who'd have thunk?
> In a single year 702 was used to collect 250 million American communications (https://www.brennancenter.org/media/140/download).
That's not what that document says. It says 250 million communications total were collected (across all programs that use Section 702, not just the wiretaps that feed into PRISM). Section 702 allows collection of foreigners' data if they have foreign intelligence value, not Americans'. From the document: "However, a declassified 2011 opinion of the FISA Court notes that 250 million internet communications were acquired the previous year under Section 702."
> But 702 goes hops out from the original target to people they talk to and the people those people talk to.
Not only does this misinterpretation of the phone metadata collection program have nothing to do with PRISM, but it's false as well.
> “Incidental” collection on Americans is expressly allowed. The FBI routinely uses 702 collection to build cases against Americans. It is a staggering program.
This doesn't mean that Americans' communications are collected, as Snowden ignorantly claimed. This means that if a foreigner with foreign intelligence value who is being wiretapped under 702 authorization talks about an American who is helping them, that can be used to build a case against the American.
>> Snowden thought it allowed the NSA to read anybody’s email
> - source please.
I gave it to you in my previous comment. He told Gellman as much.
> causing Snowden to panic and bring in the undereducated Greenwald
> First of all, the “undereducated” part is a strange assertion because it’s well established that Greenwald went to NYU law and worked for the prestigious white shoe firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz afterward. He had also at that point been writing (for the Guardian, Salon) specifically about NSA surveillance for many years. By what measure is an NYU trained lawyer with years of experience as a legal and surveillance journalist “undereducated?”
By the measure that he knows absolutely nothing about computers and was widely derided on Twitter by people who know better but instead of educating himself, he doubled down on his claims.
> But also, the Washington Post has itself reported that Gellman’s contact with Snowden began in May 2013 - Greenwald has said his started in February. So the timeline does not add up here. Even in the piece you link he acknowledges working with another journalist Snowden worked with (Poitras) at the time he was trying to persuade his editor to publish the first story.
Poitras isn't Greenwald. Gellman and Snowden have both said that Snowden contacted Greenwald after being frustrated with Gellman's fact-checking pace.
>> he shared information with the Chinese governmen
> This is false and defamatory (and invites a lawsuit, although you’re picking on someone who faces shall we say challenges defending himself this way). Snowden has repeatedly denied this (plainly baseless) assertion (eg https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/10/snowde...) and the article you link shows just the opposite - that he provided information openly to journalists (SCMP was famously independent at the time and routinely on the bad side of mainland government though that sadly changed years later).
SCMP is in China and therefore its data is China's data. To say otherwise is to be as naïve as Snowden.
I wouldn't hold it against him, most of the tech community completely misunderstood those slides, too.
PRISM was... A web front-end that would produce warrants, that would be served to the various internet companies, who would respond to them by providing the information requested. [1]
But half the people in the tech community seem to think that it was some magical all-seeing-eye-of-Sauron that had backdoors and zero-day-exploits embedded in every webservice we use, where some spook could press a button, and your texts and emails and photos would immediately appear for him.
The NSA also did things like spy on unencrypted cross-data-center traffic (SSL added and removed here ;-) ), and use zero-days against people and organizations, but that wasn't part of PRISM.
[1] There's a lot to complain about, here, but its all splitting hairs about particular legal questions (FISA courts, whether the firms in question were pushing back on these warrants enough, etc), and agency mandates.