Disclosures on NSA spying alarm US lawmakers, tech companies

(Reuters) - Recent revelations about the National Security Agency's expansive data-collection efforts have underscored the power of electronic surveillance in the Internet era and renewed an historic debate over how far the government should go in spying on its own people.

A disillusioned former CIA computer technician named Edward Snowden, who had worked as a contractor at the NSA, identified himself on Sunday as the source of multiple disclosures on the government's surveillance that were published by the Guardian and the Washington Post last week.

The information included a secret court order directing Verizon Communications Inc to turn over all its calling records for a three-month period, and details about an NSA program code-named PRISM, which collected emails, chat logs and other types of data from Internet companies. These included Google Inc, Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp, Yahoo Inc, AOL Inc and Apple Inc.

Snowden cast himself as a whistleblower alarmed about overreaching by the U.S. intelligence establishment, which was given broad powers after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and can take now take advantage of the huge growth in digital data.

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have vigorously defended the NSA's efforts as both legal and necessary. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of responding in detail to stories about PRISM.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department has launched a new round of investigations into media leaks, the very issue that consumed his department for the last month and led to renewed calls for Holder's resignation.

Intelligence officials and the technology companies say PRISM is much less invasive than initially suggested by stories in the Guardian and the Post. Several people familiar with negotiations between the Silicon Valley giants and intelligence officials said the NSA could not rummage at will through company servers and that requests for data had to be about specific accounts believed to be overseas.

Still, the revelations alarmed civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers who had supported the Patriot Act, which gave intelligence agencies new powers after 9/11, and another law granting telecommunication carriers immunity for eavesdropping at the request of the government.

"This is the law, but the way the law is being interpreted has really concerned me," Democratic Senator Mark Udall said on ABC on Sunday. "It's just to me a violation of our privacy, particularly if it's done in ways that we don't know about."

Read More: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/10/us-usa-security-summary-idUSBRE95902X20130610