65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance We Didn’t Know a Year Ago

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It's been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak , here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago:

1. We saw an example of the court orders that authorize the NSA to collect virtually every phone call record in the United Statesthat's who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where.

2. We saw NSA Powerpoint slides documenting how the NSA conducts "upstream" collection, gathering intelligence information directly from the infrastructure of telecommunications providers.

3. The NSA has created a "content dragnet" by asserting that it can intercept not only communications where a target is a party to a communication but also communications "about a target, even if the target isn't a party to the communication."

4. The NSA has confirmed that it is searching data collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to access American's communications without a warrant, in what Senator Ron Wyden called the "back door search loophole."

5. Although the NSA has repeatedly stated it does not target Americans, its own documents show that searches of data collected under Section 702 are designed simply to determine with51 percent confidence a target's "foreignness.'"

6. If the NSA does not determine a target's foreignness, it will not stop spying on that target. Instead the NSA will presume that target to be foreign unless they "can be positively identified as a United States person."

7. A leaked internal NSA audit detailed 2,776 violations of rules or court orders in just a one-year period.

8. Hackers at the NSA target sysadmins, regardless of the fact that these sysadmins themselves may be completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

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65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance We Didn’t Know a Year Ago