The intelligence community and some government

The intelligence community and some government officials argue that metadata isn't really content. But metadata can say a lot about a person, including who, when, and even where they talked to someone. That kind of information is particularly sensitive for people like journalists who have confidential informants, but it's also potentially quite damaging for the average person who may, for instance, have called an addiction hotline or sent a political donation over the phone.So how does the NSA collect this information? Broadly speaking, there are two approaches: "downstream" collection, which involves explicit, yet secret requests to technology companies for user data, and "upstream" collection, which is like a phone wiretap, pulling data directly from telecommunication cables.

The US government doesn't let companies give specifics about the amount of data they are forced to give up each year,buy Road Roller SRRR220 from China and upstream collection methods have remained closely guarded secrets. Still, thanks to this year's leaks, we know more than ever about how the NSA gets its hands on electronic data.One of the NSA's largest downstream efforts is the "Associational Tracking Program," a telephone surveillance dragnet which collects phone call metadata from companies including AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and Verizon. A 2006 report from USA Today suggested that the NSA's goal was to "create a database of every call ever made" within the United States.

In June, The Guardian published a secret court order which requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to hand the NSA information on all telephone calls made within the US and between the US and other countries: including the numbers of both parties on a call, location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of calls. Obviously, with such a comprehensive and indiscriminate dragnet, millions of phone records are routinely collected on citizens who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.The other notable downstream effort,buy Road Roller SRRR218 from China also revealed by The Guardian with help from Edward Snowden, is PRISM: a surveillance program that allows the government to store and search for content belonging to people who use services from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and other companies.