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The “War on Terror” After Snowden | 293 the call but not the name of the caller. This anonymous data was archived into a huge database. The idea was that when any foreigner on the FBI’s watch list of terrorists called any number in the United States, the FBI could trace that person’s entire chain of telephone contacts to try to determine if he or she was connected to a known terrorist cell. There was, however, a major flaw in this program: it did not cover e-mail and other Internet messaging, which by 2013 had largely replaced telephone calls. In addition, terrorist organi- zations, after the tracking down of Osama bin Laden in 2011, had become fully aware of the vulnerability of telephoning overseas. So although the NSA could cite a handful of early successes that “215” yielded, Snowden’s exposure of it did only limited damage. Snowden did vastly more damage by revealing the PRISM pro- gram, also called “702” because it was authorized in 2008 by Section 7o2 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its effectiveness proceeded from the misplaced confidence that terrorist organizations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan had in the encryption and other safeguards used by giant Internet companies, such as Apple, ) Google, Twitter, and WhatsApp. They evidently had not known © that in 2007 the NSA found a way to intercept this data before it was encrypted. The Internet, despite metaphors such as “the cloud” and “cyberspace,” initially travels through fiber cables, almost all of which run through the United States and its Five Eyes allies. So by 2013 the NSA was able to access 91 percent of the Internet before it was encrypted. This so-called upstream data included Google searches, tweets on Twitter, social media postings, Skype conversa- tions, messages on Xbox Live, instant messages sent over WhatsApp, and e-mails sent via the Internet. The NSA could also read concealed messages in photographs and online game moves. According to a declassified 2015 inspector general’s analysis, the actual intercep- tions in this program in 2013 were mainly limited to the communi- cations of preselected foreign terrorists. Until the Snowden breach was revealed on June 6, 2013, this pro- gram gave U.S. intelligence a valuable tool for gathering unexpected intelligence. Snowden must have been aware of how highly the NSA valued this program because, according to the documents he released, PRISM was “the number one source of raw intelligence used for | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 293 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019781