The+Guardian,+NSA+Files+Decoded(Vinod+Raman)

The Guardian: NSA Decoded [|http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1] By Ewen Macaskill and Gabriel Dance Vinod Raman
 * "The NSA, in its defense, frequently argues that if today’s surveillance programs existed before 9/11, it might have been able to stop those attacks. But this, too, is a matter of dispute. The intelligence agencies had a lot of capability before 9/11, and did pick up vital information, but failed to share it with one another or join up the dots."
 * "Faced with growing public and political concern over the quantities of data it is collecting, the NSA has sought to reassure people, arguing that it collected only a tiny proportion of the world’s internet traffic, roughly equivalent to a “dime on a basketball court”. But in reality, that is still a huge amount of data. The Library of Congress, one of the biggest libraries in the world, gathers 5 terabytes a month. The NSA sucks up much, much more.
 * "You don't need to be talking to a terror suspect to have your communications data analyzed by the NSA. The agency is allowed to travel "three hops" from its targets — who could be people who talk to people who talk to people who talk to you. Facebook, where the typical user has 190  friends, shows how three degrees of separation gets you to a network bigger than the population of Colorado. How many people are three "hops" from you?"
 * "As well as its upstream collection programs, the NSA also has Prism, which, according to the Snowden documents, is the biggest single contributor to its intelligence reports. It is a “downstream” program – which means the agency collects the data from Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and other US internet giants. One slide claims the agency has “direct access” to their servers, but this has been hotly disputed by the companies, who say they only comply with lawful requests for user data."

Subject: NSA Privacy Violations and its effect on general public Occasion: Privacy Violations, Illegal mass surveillance of citizens, and Collection of US data through cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, and Chat rooms. Audience: general public, government officials, foreign leaders, UN, Privacy advocates, security advocates. Purpose: To inform the readers on how, what, and why the NSA has conducted a mass surveillance ( better known as "spying") and collection of data from the general public. To shed light on the illegality of the NSA's actions and the effects it has on you. To show the NSA's action in a negative and malicious light. Speaker: privacy advocates, general public who fear that their privacy is being infringed on, EWEN MACASKILL and GABRIEL DANCE. Tone: accusatory, caustic, indignant, disdainful, critical, serious, cynical. Decisions: Used diagrams, numbers and pictures to substantiate its claim, acknolwedges opposing size argument to further substantiate their view.