Highlights from Making Sense of Snowden, Part II: What's Significant in the NSA Revelations

Abstract

In June 2013, the English newspaper The Guardian began publishing a series of secret documents leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA). Each day brought startling news, from the NSA's collection of metadata records of all calls made within the US to programs that collected and stored data of “non-US” persons to the UK Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ) interception of 200 transatlantic fiberoptic cables at the point where they reached Britain. The author summarized these initial revelations in the July/August issue of IEEE Security & Privacy. In late December 2013, in a different district court case, the NSA metadata collection was ruled legal.