Meanwhile, the bulk of the NSA’s surveillance and “offensive” information warfare capabilities remain completely unknown...
On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.
On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question - is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?
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