TECHNOLOGY LIMITATIONS: Recent revelations about the extent of surveillance by the U.S.

National Securit y Agency come as no surprise to those with a technical background in the working s of digital communications. The leaked documents show how the NSA has taken adv antage of the increased use of digital communications and cloud services, couple d with outdated privacy laws, to expand and streamline their surveillance progra ms. This is a predictable response to the shrinking cost and growing efficiency of surveillance brought about by new technology. The extent to which technology has reduced the time and cost necessary to conduct surveillance should play an i mportant role in our national discussion of this issue. The American public previously, maybe unknowingly, relied on technical and finan cial barriers to protect them from large-scale surveillance by the government. T hese implicit protections have quickly eroded in recent years as technology indu stry advances have reached intelligence agencies, and digital communications tec hnology has spread through society. As a result, we now have to replace these nat urally occurring boundaries and refactor the law to protect our privacy. The ways in which we interact has drastically changed over the past decade. The majority of our communications are now delivered and stored by third-party servi ces and cloud providers. E-mail, documents, phone calls, and chats all go throug h Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Skype, or wireless carriers like Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. And while distributed in nature, the physical infrastr ucture underlying the World Wide Web relies on key chokepoints which the governm ent can, and is, monitoring. This makes surveillance much easier because the NSA only needs to establish relationships with a few critical companies to capture the majority of the market they want to observe with few legal restrictions. The NSA has the capability to observe hundreds of millions of people communicating using these services with relatively little effort and cost. Each of the NSA programs recently disclosed by the media is unique in the type o f data it accesses, but they all share a common thread: they have been enabled b y a massive increase in capacity and reduction in cost of surveillance technique s. NSA s arrangement with just a few key telecom providers enables the collection of phone records for over 300 million Americans without the need to set up individu al trap-and-tracer registers for each person. PRISM provides programmatic access to the contents of all e-mails, voice communications, and documents privately s tored by a handful of cloud services such as Gmail, Facebook, AOL, and Skype. A presidential directive, PPD20, permits offensive surveillance tools (i.e hacking) to be deployed anywhere in the world, from the convenience of a desk at CIA head quarters in Langley. Finally, Boundless Informant, the NSA s system to track its o wn surveillance activities, reveals that the agency collected over 97 billion pi eces of intelligence information worldwide in March 2013 alone. The collection, storage, and processing of all this information would have been unimaginable thr ough analog surveillance. Recent documents indicate that the cost of the programs described above totaled roughly $140 million over the four years from 2002 to 2006, just a miniscule por tion of the NSA s approximately $10 billion annual budget. Spying no longer requir es following people or planting bugs, but rather filling out forms to demand acc ess to an existing trove of information. The NSA doesn t bear the cost of collecti ng or storing data and they no longer have to directly interact with their targe ts. The technology-enabled reach of these programs is vast, especially when comp ared to the closest equivalent possible just 10 years ago.