Part two of “United States of Secrets” focuses mainly on the Snowden leak and the Obama Administration and how they handled what the Bush Administration started. It, also, focuses more on how the government used PRISM to track people’s internet searches and internet use. PRISM was nine major online companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple) worked with the NSA to track people’s internet use to find any suspicious behavior, with the general public of Americans knowing. Edward Snowden, a former computer professional who worked with the NSA, was working compliantly with the NSA until he found out the government was wiretapping all of our information, was the one who shed the most light on this topic. Snowden knew he would be risking his freedom and life by copying the classified files and taking them with him to Hong Kong to leak the information to the press, but he decided Americans deserved to know what the government was doing and should have a say in what is happening. In response to this whole outbreak, President Obama said with the information they were not looking at names and content of messages or calls. Then the question becomes why was he allowing the NSA to still store all this information. However, the nine major companies denied to the media ever working with NSA by giving them direct access to their servers. To continue getting this information the NSA decided to send out NSLs (national security letters) to companies like Google to give them records of anything they needed. Major companies like Google did not want to deal with it so they complied, however, a smaller internet company fought back and a court deemed the letter and its contents unconstitutional. After that, some of the major companies fought back, like Google. However, the NSA was still able to track and copy information of Google by piggybacking on one of their cookies, PREFID. Obama then put together a review council to determine whether what the NSA was doing was constitutional or not. Their ultimate conclusion was no, the NSA was overreaching its boundaries and the American’s civil liberties were at risk. Obama then said “You cannot have 100% without 100% privacy.”
Through all of this the NSA created a network of surveillance, which is basically they used communication, social media, commercial sites, and search engines to track and copy data to their computers without Americans knowing. This is related to the network concept from day one. Again it is also connected highly with the concepts of algorithms because without it nothing technological would function.