The author provides an excellent, up-to-date summary of the evidence from many whistle-blowers about government-corporate spying on US citizens.
The FISA court order signed in April by Judge Roger Vinson directs Verizon to hand over to the NSA ... all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls."....
While the order specifies that "telephony metadata" does not include the "substantive content of any communication" or "the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer," that information, should an individual come in for "special handling" by the secret state, call and internet content is fully-retrievable, courtesy of US high-tech firms, under the MARINA, PINWALE and PRISM programs.
[my emphasis]
As the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden told The Guardian last Sunday: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."
"What they're doing," Snowden said, poses "an existential threat to democracy."
If what the Bush and now, Obama regimes are doing is not Orwellian blanket surveillance of the American people, then words fail.
