Barton Gellman has a piece on Wired that is adapted from his book, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Here’s just one snippet:
As I parsed the documents and interviewed sources in the fall of 2013, the implications finally sank in. The NSA had built a live, ever-updating social graph of the US.
Our phone records were not in cold storage. They did not sit untouched. They were arranged in a one-hop contact chain of each to all. All kinds of secrets—social, medical, political, professional—were precomputed, 24/7. Ledgett told me he saw no cause for concern because “the links are unassembled until you launch a query.” I saw a database that was preconfigured to map anyone’s life at the touch of a button.
Read more on Wired.
h/t, Joe Cadillic