Amid the controversial revelation that agencies of the U.S. government might be intercepting data from major technology companies, Anonymous has leaked documents allegedly pertaining to the National Security Agency's PRISM data-mining initiative.
The leaked documents pointed to the transformation of the intelligence gathering effort of the Department of Defense into a net-enabled system that can adapt to the changing environment. It talked about the evolution of the Global Information Grid (GIG) of the DoD in order to facilitate sharing of information.
Anonymous released the documents on Pastebin, a site that has been often used by the group for their online activism purposes.
"Anonymous has obtained some documents that 'they' do not want you to see, and much to 'their' chagrin, we have found them, and are giving them to you. These documents prove that the NSA is spying on you, and not just Americans. They are spying on the citizens of over 35 different countries. These documents contain information on the companies involved in GiG, and Prism," Anonymous stated on Pastebin.
However, upon inspection of the leaked documents, there is no direct mention of PRISM nor any revelation about the U.S. tech companies involved with the data-mining program.
A coser obervation further reveals that most the documents are publicly available and therefore, not leaked.
Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge reported that the purported leaked documents are not classified documents and can be easily found with a simple Google search. He explained that Anonymous might be having some trouble adding fuel to the PRISM controversy. He also pointed out that the recent dumping did not follow a certain protocol when revealing such documents and that the move may have come from just an arm of the hacktivist group.
So far, Anonymous has released 13 documents of varying topics from different agencies of the U.S. government.
The PRISM controversy started when documents about the program were leaked to the Guardian and the Washington Post. The government said there are inaccuracies about the reports that appeared on the major publications.
If the documents obtained by Anonymous were obtained from the NSA, one may wonder how an agency tasked to protect every American can do its job if it cannot even protect itself from a group of hacktivists.
