Prism: NSA confirms and defends internet surveillance

The revelations around the huge surveillance program “Prism” of the US secret service for Internet and telephone connections continues to cause excitement. In England and the United States the parliaments want to deal with the issue. The US also spoke up. The intelligence coordinator James Clapper critically criticized the media’s coverage of the program. Although, as it almost self-evidently accuses the journalists “significant misrepresentations”, he confirms the existence of the huge sniffing program. Allegedly, the US government is investigating legal proceedings against the publications.


US President Barack Obama also emphasized that the "Prism" program was endorsed by the Congress and has been "repeatedly renewed" since 2006. Obama further stated that it was "to detect and prevent potential terrorist activities." A certain political piquancy is also given to the rehearsals by Obama meeting at a summit meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jingping, where the Chinese cyber attacks on US institutions and companies should be the subject Br>

The "Prism" program is designated by US officials merely as an "internal computer system of the government" that can handle this information obtained by Internet service providers. As a result, the denials of the large IT corporations have proved to be unsatisfactory with regard to data supply.


In addition, the "Guardian" reported last Saturday (June 8, 2013), which enormous amounts of data a different system of the military secret service NSA under the name "Boundless Informant" sucks. After that, in March 1013, more than 97 billion files were collected, with content such as e-mails, films, photos and other documents. Iran accounted for 14.1 billion files, Pakistan 13.5 billion, Jordan 12.7 billion files, Egypt 7.6 billion, and India 6.3 billion. The US is said to have lost 2.9 billion data accesses.


Tip: If you want to be more anonymous and safer on the road in the face of the surveillance scandal on the Internet, you should wait for the PC Magazine, issue 08/13. Our colleagues from the print department will update you from the first friday of the month. This booklet will be published on July 5, 2013.