UPDATE Seriously, just go watch this video with the whistleblower who is the source all the below.

I've been tweeting up a storm and got a couple questions along the lines of "what do you think of PRISM?" so I thought I'd sit down and exercise my ability to explain in long-form what I think is going on, and what it means.

The News

Late last week, Glenn Greenwald broke a story at the Guardian about how the NSA — the National Security Agency; the camera-shy and more data/computation driven cousin to the CIA — was collecting phone records for millions of Americans:

National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

Then, the day after the Guardian and the Washington Post published stories based on leaked documents about a program called PRISM which allows the US and UK intelligence services to mine data from popular internet destinations: