2013 June 6

Washington Post Exposes Secret NSA PRISM Spying Program

 

The Washington Post on this day published an article on the National Security Agency’s PRISM program that gives the agency access to nine different Internet companies and allows it to collect emails and other data on foreign terrorist targets outside of the U.S.

The story was the second based on NSA documents stolen and leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden. The first appeared on June 5, 2013. Media stories based on the documents continued for more than a year.

The Post story featured slides from a NSA presentation about PRISM. Additional slides were published in later stories by the Post. One slide indicated the dates on which the NSA gained access to particular providers. The first was Microsoft on the 11th of September 2007. The next two were Yahoo on the 12th of March 2008 and Google on the 14th of January 2009.

The highly classified PRISM program, which began in 2007, had never been publicly disclosed before. Many believe that Congressional members of the House and Senate intelligence committees may have been briefed on the program, but under the terms of such briefings are forbidden to speak publicly about classified information. Further revelations about undisclosed surveillance by the NSA based on the Snowden-related documents continued for more than a year.

On April 14, 2014, The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded to the Guardian US and the Washington Post for their stories on National Security Agency (NSA) spying based on documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden. On February 16, 2014, reporters also won the prestigious George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism for their stories based on the Snowden-released documents.

Get the full story: Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (2014)

Read Snowden’s autobiography: Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (2019)

Read the Post articlehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

Search the ACLU database of Snowden-related NSA documents (searchable by date, relevance, or date of release)https://www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-search?page=1

Learn more: Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (2012)

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