Chapter 5
Secret Bits
How Codes Became Unbreakable
Going Dark
The section “Bits Cubed: The Snowden Files” in Chapter 2, details how Edward Snowden left his government consulting job and flew to Hong Kong (see the section), taking some thumb drives and laptop computers with him. On those devices were thousands of classified documents. Soon The Washington Post and other news outlets began to publish the details of a variety of secret surveillance programs run by the U.S. government and its allies.1
PRISM targeted the technology companies, such as Google and Yahoo!, through which vast amounts of email flowed. MUSCULAR cracked the data flows within these companies. Dishfire was specialized to text messages. XKeyscore targeted the great global fiber ...
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