A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. Barton Gellman Read Quote
On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered. Barton Gellman Read Quote
Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today. Even among the FBI’s doubters, few disagree that the bureau has come a long way. Barton Gellman Read Quote
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. Barton Gellman Read Quote
The NSA’s business is ‘information dominance,’ the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. Barton Gellman Read Quote
For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations. Barton Gellman Read Quote
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people – deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and ‘incidentally,’ when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets. Barton Gellman Read Quote
CloudShield did not see itself as a cloak-and-dagger company. It made its name for high-end hardware that could peer deeply into Internet traffic and pull out and analyze ‘packets’ of data as they flew by. Barton Gellman Read Quote
No one can keep track of how many people use Internet, how many machines it can reach, or even how many sub- and sub-sub-networks form a part of it. Barton Gellman Read Quote
