Some Questions on XKeyscore

Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian has written another very interesting article on XKeyscore, an NSA intelligence program to search huge amounts of bulk traffic that allied intelligence agencies are collecting from around the globe.  The Guardian also made available a top-secret presentation on XKeyscore from 2008.  This represents the program as it was inherited by the Obama administration from the Bush administration.  However, comments in interviews by Edward Snowden suggest that substantially similar capabilities still exist.

I wanted to draw attention to several things in the NSA presentation that the Guardian didn't mention but that struck me as interesting (having a computer security background).  The first is this map:

Several questions arise:

Snowden and the Toxicity of the Internet

I think we are still operating with very partial information here.  Glenn Greenwald has promised that he has thousands of documents from Snowden still, dozens of which are newsworthy.  It's still very unclear how Snowden came to have access to the documents he seems to have, who he really is, whether his testimony is 100% accurate, or where he has gone now.  I assume a lot more will come out in coming days and weeks.

With that caveat, here are a few thoughts: this case illustrates some long-standing concerns I have about the direction of society.

Known Software Vulnerabilities