A senior lawyer for the National Security Agency(NSA) recently admitted that his employer essentially gets help from some top media and technology companies to violate the Fourth Amendment protections of millions of Americans. The lawyer, Rajesh De, who is the general counsel for the NSA, said recently that U.S. tech firms were completely aware of the agency’s surveillance and widespread data collection, as reported by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
De said that all communications content and associated metadata scooped up by the agency under a 2008 law governing (and permitting) such surveillance took place with the full knowledge of the tech companies. He said that is true both for “Prism,” an Internet-based data collection program, and the “upstream” collection of all communications moving online. As The Guardian further reported: Asked during a [recent] hearing of the U.S. government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the FISA Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.” FULL REPORT
