Edward Snowden, a computer scientist in his late 20s, used to work in the National Security Agency before he revealed a considerable number of its secrets. The moment he did, very courageously that he revealed his name, had to flee to Russia for hiding. The Russian government, in return, objected to extraditing him.
What Snowden did was downloading some of the NSA documents that reveal how both United States and Britain sensor people’s secret life from phone calls to emails. The reason why they do this, as it went in the media, is to defuse potential terrorist attacks.
Snowden’s top ten leaks are:
10 Verizon Spying on You
The government asked Verizon Company to spy on specific phone calls and gives it to them. NSA consequently got these records that included callers ID, location, and time of the phone call. It then said that the contents were excluded from such records!
9 Keep it Secret
The government has not only asked Verizon to work as espionage, but it has also ordered them not to speak about it. It is astonishing that such policies come from one of so called democratic nations!
8 Prism
Prism is the confidential electronic program; it is made for the sake of censoring private information published on people’s Facebook profiles and emails over different platforms including Gmail, yahoo, Aol and Skype. The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is the United States federal court that asked for this program to be made.
7 No Privacy Rights
These policies of the federal government violate privacy laws as written in the constitution. However, Obama assured, in effect of these revelations that no phone calls recordings did happen and that such policies are used to supersede potential attacks. So they are opposing terrorist attacks with another.
6 Boundless Informant
The boundless informant is a tool used for analyzing data made by the National Security Agency. It gives the institution a synopsis of the data collected from around the world. One of the documents revealed by Snowden showed billions of records from computers all over the United States.
5 Clapper’s Claims
James Clapper is the director of National Intelligence, he came out claiming that the documents posted by the Guardian and Washington Post, as revealed by Snowden, did not target the citizens of the United States. He said that the government was using social media in order to obtain information of terrorists or foreign citizens.
4 Big Companies
Such electronic programs, like Prism, would not have such effect if it were not for the help from big companies like Facebook and Google. Yet when Google was interviewed about the matter, they claimed that the issue of Google helping the federal government comes to the media all the time. They added that no “back doors” are opened for the government to log into.
3 XKeyscore
XKeyscore is another program like the Prism that gives access to users to go looking into different kinds of data including emails, video calls in addition to people’s browsing records online. They have even profited more from the fact that Microsoft bought Skype. NSA as such was able to get three times the video chats and calls.
2 Microsoft
Among all the big companies implicated in the NSA issue, Microsoft came out as the biggest name that collaborated with FBI to get more information. The documents revealed that the FBI had a free access to Outlook.com as well as to Hotmail through the Prism program.
1 David Miranda
The government is taking actions to stop more of such reports from coming out. To do so, they detained Miranda in the airport confiscating his laptop, mobile phone, and camera.
