There can't be any discussion of modern day US surveillance practices without name-dropping Ed Snowden at least once. He was really the first major whistle blower on the NSA in the information age, offering an insight into the inner workings of the surveillance-machine that most Americans didn't even know was working behind the scenes. He provided thousands of government documents to back up his claims as well, shifting the discussion about surveillance from one characterized by hypothetical scenarios to one of facts. The amount of data being collected was huge- But wait, that's not the right word to use. See, this was one of the things that Snowden revealed, is that almost every word used by the NSA in press releases and congressional interviews is specifically defined within NSA legal code. Data can only be considered "collected" if a human eye has looked over it. Operating on a more common-sense definition of collection, the NSA has attained billions of times the amount of data they say they've collected. Using various broad sweeping programs and tools such as dragnets, the NSA operates under a collect-it-all mentality in this modern day and age, sifting through the data afterwards. There are quite a few problems with this approach, which will be addressed in the next post in this mini-series...
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