The NSA is tapping undersea cables and sucking up e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g that crosses them AND getting data through court orders and national security letters AND getting all phone metadata from all phone companies AND tapping into the backbones at appropriate places and sucking up everything that crosses those places AND listening in to every satellite communication AND......
It's AND, not OR.
Simple terms. If either of those two points come to light (NSA backbone taps of Internet companies or clandestine NSA/IC operatives planted in Internet companies, perhaps in foreign subsidiaries of the same) you publicly post that you were wrong/credulous and the "conspiracy theorists" were right.
After all, if the FBI infiltrated [2] the unimportant KKK, the US government definitely has an incentive to infiltrate the all-important Google.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and
Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has
estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been
installed throughout the nation
And who even knows what the NSA's "lawful charter" is? Secret interpretations of laws (meaning secret laws) evidently mean it's ok for them to capture the phone records (and, as reported, credit card statements) of everyone. They lie about what they are doing under oath and they hunt, jail, and kill those who tell the truth.
They prevented these unconstitutional secret interpretations of the law from getting to the courts or to the public. That's the only reason why they haven't been struck down.
I responded, "tapping overseas cables is NSA's stated mission, and so it doesn't follow that they're tapping domestic communications".
You responded that of course they're exceeding their legal bounds, because the Fourth Amendment restricts them, which of course begs the question.
"tapping overseas cables is NSA's stated mission, and so it
doesn't follow that they're tapping domestic
communications".
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the
world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the
early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It
doesn't need permission. That's its job.
But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email
from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a
mail server in the United States, the same computer that
handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is
prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the
United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a
warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly
authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that
enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give
the government unprecedented, warrantless access to
Americans' private conversations.http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305047-dem-...
So if PRISM is just the tip of the iceberg, what method do you suggest for speculating as to what exactly they are doing domestically? Maybe, say, look what they are doing overseas?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
All the pennies (and beam splitters) have yet to drop. I would be shocked if the NSA wasn't coupling company cooperation with direct packet inspection/backbone wiretapping. They could even use the FISA requests as training data under some scenarios to help reverse engineer protocols.
You really want to bet that there is nothing more to see here, that more Room 641As don't exist? As for "conspiracy-theoretic-nonsense", a hidden conspiracy to wiretap hundreds of millions of Americans (derided as a "myth" by the NSA lawyer Rajesh De and lied about in front of Congress by Clapper) was just revealed -- because a man risked his life and freedom to leak the first FISA order in 35 years. Given that senior government officials are actually admitting in realtime to past untruths, it might be a good idea to be a wee bit less credulous when it comes to our government overlords.