Feds Confirm Secret Data Collection

Last night the Obama administration confirmed that it has been using Facebook, Google, and Apple to secretly collect data on foreigners overseas. The story was first broken by openly gay journalist Glenn Greenwald in articles published by the Guardian and the Washington Post. Today the New York Times reports on the acknowledgement by the feds:

The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration. Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.

Federal officials said that the data collected "cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States." Information was collected via chat logs, video conferencing, emails, photos, and file transfers.

Greenwald appeared on CNN last night.

"There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald. “So whatever the Justice Department wants to do, they can beat their chests all they want,” he said. “People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing … light to what it is they’re doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them. It’s well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve. That’s certainly how I intend to treat them moving forward, with more investigation and disclosures.”

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