The secret behind NSA's Prism program? "Even bigger data seizure."

Xeni Jardin 1:17 pm Sat Jun 15, 2013

Amy Fiscus of the AP tweets, "Worried by Prism? It's actually part of a bigger effort. Not worried by Prism? It's actually part of a bigger effort." She's referring to this AP story, a good explainer of Prism and the NSA practices that preceded it post-9/11.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" – not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans. This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies.

Related: In Vanity Fair, Eichenwald writes "I can't stand it any more," and details what he claims are "falsehoods" in coverage of the surveillance scandal, to date.

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