Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance
NSA’s arrangement with just a few key telecom providers enables the collection of phone records for over 300 million Americans without the need to set up individual trap-and-tracer registers for each person. PRISM provides programmatic access to the contents of all e-mails, voice communications, and documents privately stored by a handful of cloud services such as Gmail, Facebook, AOL, and Skype. A presidential directive, PPD20, permits “offensive” surveillance tools (i.e hacking) to be deployed anywhere in the world, from the convenience of a desk at CIA headquarters in Langley. Finally, Boundless Informant, the NSA’s system to track its own surveillance activities, reveals that the agency collected over 97 billion pieces of intelligence information worldwide in March 2013 alone. The collection, storage, and processing of all this information would have been unimaginable through analog surveillance.
Recent documents indicate that the cost of the programs described above totaled roughly $140 million over the four years from 2002 to 2006, just a miniscule portion of the NSA’s approximately $10 billion annual budget. Spying no longer requires following people or planting bugs, but rather filling out forms to demand access to an existing trove of information. The NSA doesn’t bear the cost of collecting or storing data and they no longer have to directly interact with their targets. The technology-enabled reach of these programs is vast, especially when compared to the closest equivalent possible just 10 years ago.