Highlights from Making Sense of Snowden, Part II: What´s Significant in the NSA Revelations

In June 2013, the English newspaper The Guardian began publishing a series of secret documents leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA). Each day brought startling news, from the NSA´s collection of metadata records of all calls made within the US to programs that collected and stored data of “non-US” persons to the UK Government Communications Headquarters´ (GCHQ) interception of 200 transatlantic fiberoptic cables at the point where they reached Britain. The author summarized these initial revelations in the July/August issue of IEEE Security & Privacy. In late December 2013, in a different district court case, the NSA metadata collection was ruled legal.