The story, by veteran surveillance reporter James Risen and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, creates a picture of an agency able to know intimate details about our lives, details that pierce usual protections of privacy. The agency might know, for example, our friends and associates and where we’ve been. It might have “clues to religious or political affiliations.” It may “pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.”
The Times reported the Snowden material included “A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos [that] describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that ‘revolutionize’ data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.”
Read the full