A Guide to the NSA's Perversion of Privacy: What Are the Most Outrageous Breaches into Your Life?

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/guide-leaks-exposing-nsas-perversion-privacy



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Early March 2012: Wired Magazine’s James Banford reports on the NSA building the country’s largest spy center in the Utah desert—a $2 billion, million-square-foot structure. Former NSA mathematician William Binney describes a program codenamed Stellar Wind that from its earliest days had the capacity to record 320 million phone calls a day. Binney’s descriptions of the NSA’s activities were similar to those of former NSA analyst Russell Tice, who warned in 2009 that the agency “monitored all communications” of Americans.

Late March 2012: Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson questions NSA Director General Keith Alexander about the allegations made by Binney. Alexander denies that the NSA intercepts Americans’ phone calls, emails, bank records, text messages and other private information.

March 2013: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has access to private information on U.S. intelligence agencies thanks to serving on the Intelligence Committee, asks the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper responds that it does not, at least “not wittingly.”

Early June 2013: The first of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s stories about the NSA comes out. Based on documents culled from ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Greenwald revealed in the Guardian that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered Verizon to turn over metadata from the phone records of millions of its customers. We first learn of PRISM, a still-mysterious government program used by U.S. and British intelligence agencies to suck up private information from popular online services like Facebook. A top-secret directive by President Obama ordering his top national security officials to draw up targets for potential cyber attacks is leaked.

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