This coverage from yesterday’s PCLOB hearing needed to be broken out from other coverage already mentioned on this blog because of its focus on what US tech firms knew. Spencer Ackerman reports:
The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.
Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.
Read more on The Guardian.
Update: See Mike Masnick’s response to Ackerman’s story on TechDirt.