The US spying programme “touches” 1.6% of internet traffic in fact reveal the vast scale of snooping, a senior security researcher has said. The figures were “utterly meaningless” since the memorandum is vague about where the data is taken from. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23669003 Caspar Bowden told the BBC that the National Security Agency (NSA) was a “surveillance leviathan” with no protection for non-US residents. “After subtracting video media and spam, which accounts for most data by volume, 1.6% is an admission the NSA has become a surveillance leviathan.”
Mr Bowden also said there was “no privacy restraint or restriction” in the way that the NSA can access the communications of foreigners.
“The reassurances of the NSA document are addressed entirely to the American people. It simply disregards the human right to privacy of the rest of the world,” Mr Bowden said.
Mr Bowden had warned the European Parliament about the reach of US surveillance before a series of leaks by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden exposed the existence of widespread electronic surveillance.
The Obama administration also released a policy document outlining its legal rationale for collecting telephone metadata. It said the US government needed to keep those records itself for up to five years because telephone companies normally do not keep their own records that long.
