Today the Washington Post ran a story that should (but won’t) finally make government spying a household issue. Under the name PRISM, the NSA has had a direct line into the servers of leading internet companies – Google, Facebook, Skype, and others. For years, they have been able to tap into virtually all the information that these companies have collected about people, using cross-connections and logins to track people across the entire internet. The Post is somewhat unclear on whether the actual content is being collected, or metadata – for example, an email’s timestamp and destination is metadata, whereas the actual subject line and text are the content itself.

This is not only unconstitutional, but very obviously and blatantly unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution reads in full as such:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Emails and Facebook data very clearly count as “papers and effects”, reading their data without their consent is obviously a “search”, and pulling indiscriminately from all web traffic is an extremely unreasonable search. Somehow I doubt that the NSA got warrants either. Their justification is that certain statistical signifiers are used to indicate at least 51% certainty that a target isn’t American – though of course even when they’re spying on foreigners they end up pulling tons of data on Americans as well (e.g., emails sent from Americans to the targets).

To state the obvious: this is illegal behavior from the NSA and horrifyingly shameful behavior from Silicon Valley. With all their self-righteous talk of privacy and user protection, this is craven and disgusting behavior from companies that aspire to be trusted partners for all Americans. As for the NSA, those responsible should be fired and preferably jailed.

On the bright side, it’s kind of funny that it turns out all the conspiracy theories about the NSA have turned out to be correct. For many years, kooky nuts have insisted that the NSA has been watching every electronic communication in America. It generally focuses on the ECHELON system (the NSA sure seems to be fond of all-caps names, incidentally) but it turned out to be called PRISM. Responsible adults generally respond by pointing out that such a vast conspiracy would be impossible to keep secret, and furthermore would be so obviously illegal that the NSA’s lawyers would steer clear. Well, the responsible adults were wrong and the kooks were right.