Snowden Disclosures — NSA Mass Surveillance Revealed
Edward Snowden had worked as an NSA contractor through Booz Allen Hamilton when he copied approximately 1.5 million classified documents and flew to Hong Kong to meet journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The first revelations were published in The Guardian on 5 June 2013: a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over the phone metadata of millions of Americans to the NSA. Subsequent revelations, published over months, detailed: **PRISM**: A programme under Section 702 of FISA collecting internet communications (email, chat, video, photos) directly from the servers of nine major technology companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo. The companies had been compelled to participate under court orders they were prohibited from disclosing. **MUSCULAR**: An NSA-GCHQ programme that collected data by tapping the fibre-optic cables between Google's and Yahoo's overseas data centres — outside the FISA framework and without company knowledge. **Boundless Informant**: A tool visualising global metadata collection showing that the NSA collected approximately 97 billion pieces of internet data per month globally. **XKeyscore**: An analytical system allowing NSA analysts to search through vast databases of emails, online chats, and browsing histories of millions of ordinary people worldwide. The disclosures confirmed that intelligence agencies had built infrastructure for near-total surveillance of global digital communications — programmes that operated with legal cover (Section 702 FISA) but without public knowledge. President Obama defended the programmes as legal and necessary; the US government charged Snowden under the Espionage Act. Snowden flew to Moscow and received Russian asylum. The political and legal consequences were substantial: the EU-US Safe Harbor framework for data transfers was struck down by the European Court of Justice (2015); the USA FREEDOM Act (2015) ended bulk domestic metadata collection; dozens of countries revised surveillance laws. Major technology companies accelerated encryption deployments in direct response.
- Year: 2013 CE
- Category: Political
