WASHINGTON — Edward Snowden, the former defense-contractor-turned-classified-document-leaker, has received most attention in the United States for revealing wide-ranging government snooping into phone and Internet records. But the activities Snowden has exposed are not limited to inside the United States. His leaks also have made waves in Hong Kong, China and Great Britain. Here’s a look at what he’s alleged.
Verizon customer metadata
On June 5, The Guardian newspaper revealed a top-secret order issued in April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing cellphone carrier Verizon to turn over millions of customers’ cellphone records to the National Security Agency on a daily basis until July 19, 2013. This metadata, while not containing actual content of calls, includes time and duration of calls along with numbers dialed.
PRISM Internet surveillance program
The Guardian and The Washington Post reveal June 6 a set of government PowerPoint slides that describe PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency program that allows data collection from Internet giants Apple, Google and Facebook, among others. The slides show that collected data can include email, voice and video chats, and social networking details, and can also include “special requests” for additional information. The documents say that the data sweeps are run with cooperation from Internet companies, but both Google and Apple deny having knowledge of the PRISM program.