What to take away from the PRISM leak

There are two key revelations that have come out of Edward Snowden's leak. First, that the FISA foreign intelligence court makes requests to the NSA to monitor domestic terrorism suspects without warrants. Second, the PRISM initiative whereby private tech companies agree to make their remotely stored data accessible to the NSA.

 Of the two revelations, the second is clearly more significant.

Edward Snowden in his Glenward interview makes specific reference to the retrieval of conversations with friends. If you become a target of state or federal investigation, they will look back on all of your records from early life to try to prove that you were always a bad seed, that your actions were the lifetime in the making.

The fact is that most people do not spend their whole lives planning subversive plots against the government, and so the value of retrospective information about suspects from the age of twelve presents limited value to the security community in preventing attacks and as evidence of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks.

The way I see it, retrospective information, for lack of a better term, is valuable to the intelligence community for two reasons. First, it can be used to make ad hominem attacks on individuals whose motivation for committing terrorist offences would seem to be in response to conditions specific to the period in which they took place. That is to say that it would divert the focus of the controversy from the conditions that caused them to protest to the personalities themselves.

Second, it can be used as a recruitment tool, to screen members of the intelligence community who might harbor radical leftist sympathies.