New revelations of widespread surveillance leave citizens outraged. Can the government's power reeled in?

Secret NSA spying: how can it be stopped?

The US National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been secretly spying on millions of Verizon wireless customers in the US for at least several months — and likely more companies’ customers for longer, going back seven years. The revelation, detailed in a classified court document published yesterday in The Guardian by journalist Glenn Greenwald, has sparked outrage among citizens and civil rights advocacy groups. On Thursday evening, The Washington Post broke the news that the NSA and FBI had also been spying on customers of some of the largest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple, in realtime, also for years.

The reports have raised serious questions about the scope of the surveillance powers granted to US intelligence agencies following the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks. Namely: how long has the US government been doing this? How many ordinary citizens have been surveilled? And, perhaps most important: why didn’t the American people know anything about these efforts until now, and what should be done to curtail them going forward? When it comes to the spying on phone records at least, there are a few answers, none of them comforting.

"WE HAVE REPORTS DATING BACK TO 2006 THAT THIS WAS TAKING PLACE."

"We have reports dating back to 2006 that this was taking place," said Amie Stopanovich, director of domestic surveillance review at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to protecting user privacy. She pointed to an article published by USA Today that year that was widely circulated Wednesday on social media after Greenwald’s story broke. Citing anonymous sources, the 2006 piece describes an NSA surveillance program covering "tens of millions" of American customers of Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth, a company acquired by AT&T later that year. "When that story broke, a lot of people looked at it and said ‘okay, well you can’t prove it, there’s not that much information here" Stopanovich said. "But fast forward to 2013, it turns out, that report was basically correct."