Cloud computing helps the NSA monitor the Internet

The global quake seems to be hard to quell, as the National Security Agency (NSA) has exposed a "prism" program that monitors public privacy. How does the United States obtain personal information on a global scale through the Internet and mobile communications? Despite the tight-lipped of the US government, the way the Pentagon used to do it, the outside world can still glimpse.

The BBC said 11th that the U.S. National Security Agency to obtain personal information via the Internet, first of all "attributed" to the era of cloud computing. Today, a lot of user data is no longer stored on personal computers, but in the hands of cloud service providers. The latter has an impossible relationship with the United States, which is either an American company or a system business in the United States. According to the report, for example, Facebook said in its privacy policy that all users must agree that their data were "transferred and stored in the United States". This opens the door for the US to circumvent the information protection laws of other countries by obtaining personal information from overseas users. The PRISM project allows US intelligence personnel to access the 9 main technology companies ' servers through the backdoor, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. These companies ' servers process and store large amounts of information. With the authorization of these companies, it is not easy for the NSA to gather information and monitor civilian mobile communications in the US internet giant's servers. "There is no government phone or computer at Fort Meade (the NSA's headquarters)," the report said, as the National Security Agency, which employs Silicon Valley's private companies, is responsible for the technical work of the PRISM project.

The real challenge for the NSA is to analyze and select the vast amount of data it gets. The most easily identifiable information is document, database information. American intelligence has long been ropes in this regard, using sensitive words for screening and further screening based on the frequency and level of sensitive words. The NSA is an expert at listening to radio communications, and its main job during the Cold War was to listen to Soviet radio signals. Traditional radio monitoring requires a lot of manpower and time, now through the voice recognition technology, monitoring system can quickly filter the sensitive words in the call, and then automatically to contain sensitive words of the key monitoring of communications. U.S. President Barack Obama defended the NSA's failure to listen to phone calls, and to identify "terrorist suspects" by analyzing phone numbers and length of calls. The more troublesome information is image and video. Although the United States has developed automatic image recognition