Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor, has leaked out some pretty surprising details about the extent of the federal government’s spying program on American citizens.
One of the most startling revelations was that the FBI actually installs equipment at various tech companies to siphon away data:
information passes from “the FBI’s interception unit on the premises of private companies…to one or more ‘customers’ at the NSA, CIA or FBI.”
Peter Eckersley of the Electronics Frontier Foundation outlines how it’s done:
It could mean collection devices on the companies’ networks, passive ‘drop boxes’ on companies’ networks, or even fiber optic taps.
This means that the FBI is collecting user information from Facebook, Yahoo, Google, every major tech company, and routing it directly to their servers.
What a brave new world we live in.
