Officials: NSA's PRISM Targets Email Addresses, Not Keywords

wiredmikey writes "The US government's PRISM Internet spying program exposed by Edward Snowden targets suspect email addresses and phone numbers but does not search for keywords like terrorism, officials said Wednesday. Top lawyers of the country's intelligence apparatus including the NSA and FBI participated Wednesday in a public hearing on the controversial US data-mining operations that intercept emails and other Internet communications including on social media networks like Facebook, Google or Skype. 'We figure out what we want and we get that specifically, that's why it's targeted collection rather than bulk collection,' Robert Litt, general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the hearing. Under authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA asks Internet service providers to hand over messages sent from or received by certain accounts such as [e-mail], the Justice Department's Brad Wiegmann said, using a hypothetical example."

So the question is, is this true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is this like Clapper said: we only call it "collected" when we look at it. It's not collected yet when we save it in our datacenter with everything else.

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