[iTWire] One year after Snowden, it’s business as usual for the NSA

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Nearly one year on from the first revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is still business as usual. The NSA continues to scoop up all the data it wants, while the technology companies which have co-operated with it all along continue to try and convince the public that they are doing what they can to curtail such activity. […]

There has been systematic lying by the NSA about its data collection but in the face of its own graphics and the gobbledygook that it has devised to draft its memos being published there is little the agency can indulge in apart from weasel words that would have done that grand old practitioner of the art, Donald Rumsfeld, proud. […]

The technology companies – Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, and Yahoo! – are no better. They have tried to convince people that they are on the side of the public. Microsoft even went so far as to say that it would be willing to store data of foreign customers in their own countries, and not in the US. But the US courts promptly came down with a judgement that any data stored anywhere by a US company would be subject to the jurisdiction of the US government. […]

http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/64284-one-year-after-snowden-its-business-as-usual-for-the-nsa