United States

The Truth About America

What is happening in the United States?


Here’s just some of what we’ve learned, or had confirmed, in 2013: ]
 * The NSA collects virtually every phone call record in the United States—that’s who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where. (Guardian)
 * The NSA "is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans." (Washington Post)
 * The NSA is collecting "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," as part of what it calls "upstream" collection, including content and metadata of emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else. (Washington Post)
 * The NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country." (New York Times)
 * The NSA "is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world." (Washington Post)
 * NSA "is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age." (New York Times and Pro Publica)
 * NS "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world" and has "positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans." (Washington Post)
 * NSA has "has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches." ([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html Washington Post)
 * NSA "is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance." (Washington Post)
 * NSA "officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests." (Wall Street Journal)
 * NSA and GHCQ spied on online games, including World or Warcraft and Second Life. (ProPublica)