With this kind of setup and ambition to capture and evaluate private conversations (well, not so private now), makes Echelon that much more believable, and that PRISM is a reflection of the infamous project, but focused solely on the US.
The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON Dictionary) that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective listening stations maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept.
At a 2009 conference on so-called cloud computing, an NSA official said the agency was developing a new system by linking its various databases and using Hadoop software to analyze them, according to comments reported by the trade publication InformationWeek.
The system would hold "essentially every kind of data there is," said Randy Garrett, who was then director of technology for the NSA's integrated intelligence program. "The object is to do things that were essentially impossible before.
For Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy researcher and technologist, this is "a process for submitting [Section] 702 requests and getting responses in a machine-readable form."
The 41-page PRISM Powerpoint presentation "could be seen as a business development deck indicating all the various providers that they currently have 'relationships with,'" he told Mashable.
The system is "basically a data-ingestion API," he said.
Soltani speculated that based on what we know now, PRISM is a "streamlined way" to submit Section 702 orders to the companies for them to review the requests, and it gives the NSA the ability to handle and process the response "in an automated fashion," just like an app like TripIt, which automatically parses information from your flight reservations."
Main Core contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security. The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other sources, is collected and stored without warrants or court orders. The database's name derives from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.