Look who’s listening

THICK and fast they came at last, and more and more and more. On June 5th the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans not suspected of crimes. A day later, the Washington Post reported the existence of a programme code-named PRISM, under which the NSA collects an unknown quantity of e-mails, internet phone-calls, photos, videos, file transfers and social-networking data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Skype, Microsoft and PalTalk—a video-chat service popular in the Middle East and among Muslims.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that widespread collection of telephone records had been going on for years. As for PRISM, on June 8th America’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, issued a rare public statement acknowledging its existence, but stressing that it is lawful and operates under a secret court that oversees intelligence-gathering. The leaker revealed himself the next day: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had worked as a security contractor at the NSA for the past four years, employed by several private contractors.