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People seem to assume that PRISM would be a passive "find me the terrorists" button. I imagine in reality it's just a tool they use among others, similar to any

by jiggy2011 13y ago

People seem to assume that PRISM would be a passive "find me the terrorists" button. I imagine in reality it's just a tool they use among others, similar to any other law enforcement database (Just with a much larger dataset). Like say for example, you catch a terrorist but he won't tell you anything and you suspect they were not acting alone. So, maybe you interview the guy's brother who insists he knows nothing , hasn't seen his brother for 5 years and loves America. So you check the brother out with PRISM and find that: He had an IM conversation with someone in 2002 and he spoke about how happy he was that 9/11 happened. Someone had taken and uploaded a photo to a social network of the brothers at the same place 2 years ago. You decide that putting covert surveillance on the brother might not be a waste of resources.

brown9-2 13y ago
You don't have to imagine how Prism works, as it has already been described in decent detail in a number of articles: http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-of-prism http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-... http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mining-NSA-scandal http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-is...
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Those don't seem to really expain how , why or when it is used.
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    Ambinder's article describes it as a piece of software that would be used daily to view info collected from many sources.
  - omegant 13y ago
    In "task force black", a book about how the SAS special forces helled fight alqaeda in Irak, they talk how they had all the cellphone network controlled and each time they collected a mobile they tracked their calls and that way they localized other terrorists with more mobiles. It was pretty useful in that situation. For example the top level of alqaeda never used mobiles or radios but eventually they had people around them who did.

brown9-2 13y ago

You don't have to imagine how Prism works, as it has already been described in decent detail in a number of articles: http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-of-prism http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-... http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-isnt-data-mining-NSA-scandal http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/prism-is...

jiggy2011 13y ago
Those don't seem to really expain how , why or when it is used.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  Ambinder's article describes it as a piece of software that would be used daily to view info collected from many sources.
- omegant 13y ago
  In "task force black", a book about how the SAS special forces helled fight alqaeda in Irak, they talk how they had all the cellphone network controlled and each time they collected a mobile they tracked their calls and that way they localized other terrorists with more mobiles. It was pretty useful in that situation. For example the top level of alqaeda never used mobiles or radios but eventually they had people around them who did.