Right now:

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency contractor who leaked highly sensitive information about the super-secret agency, will answer questions online this morning through the website of The Guardian, which broke Snowden’s initial story.

Snowden, who fled the U.S. after revealing top-secret details on the government’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet records, has said he “does not expect to see home again.” He claims that he took refuge in Hong Kong.

The British newspaper asked readers to post their questions to Snowden and recommend their favorites. He planned to go through the thread and embed his replies as posts in a live blog beginning at 11 a.m. ET

Remember that old joke about “the cat’s on the roof”, and how I last used it about Fukushima to illustrate how they would release misleading info in increments before they’d finally tell us the truth?

Well, last week, we were “only” collecting metadata on phone calls. Now we find out that in a classified briefing, members of Congress were told NSA analysts can listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant. Yep, I’d say the cat’s up on the NSA roof:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

[pull]Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.[/pull]

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
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Some are more equal than others.

So PRISM wasn’t really the reason this plot was stopped? Well, slap me silly!

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration declassified a handful of details Tuesday that credited its PRISM Internet spying program with intercepting a key email that unraveled a 2009 terrorist plot in New York.

The details, declassified by the director of national intelligence, were circulated on Capitol Hill as part of government efforts to tamp down criticism of two recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Najibullah Zazi’s foiled plot to bomb the New York subways has become the centerpiece of that effort. It remains the most serious al-Qaida plot inside the United States since the 9/11 terror attacks.

In the rush to defend the surveillance programs, however, government officials have changed their stories and misstated key facts of the Zazi plot. And they’ve left out one important detail: The email that disrupted the plan could easily have been intercepted without PRISM.