“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Barack Obama said today. Honestly, we didn’t think anyone was. If he intended to be reassuring, his words had the opposite effect. The president’s remarks in defense of the government’s vast electronic surveillance programs help explain why U.S. citizens -- and, not incidentally, U.S. businesses -- should be so unnerved by them.
The first point is that we don’t necessarily know what is happening. According to the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are sifting through vast amounts of data -- including audio, video, e-mail, photographs, documents and much else -- produced by nine U.S. technology companies. The program, code-named Prism, allegedly spied on content being shared by foreign users.
