re: #56 Charles Johnson

I’d like to know how the NSA is supposed to be getting your MS Word documents and browser history, since those are stored locally on most people’s systems. Is the NSA now supposed to have the magic power to rummage through any hard drive in any computer? Maybe by using pixie dust?

Yeah, I’d like to know that too. You know way more about this geek shit than me, but I don’t see how the NSA can rummage through my local storage directly either..

Just a a matter of technicalities, now, leaving the tinfoil hat assertions aside for a minute. Can Apple or Microsoft access a local hard drive content when they check for software updates?
Because if they can get it, then it’s no longer just stored locally, right?

What I’m asking, as a technical matter now, not as a political question, is whether it’s possible (I’m asking about possibilities, now, not likelihoods) for some agency to access my local storage via a third party like that?

Browser histories.
Are histories from using Explorer or Safari or Firefox stored anywhere else besides on my hard drive? I use Firefox, for example. Does Mozilla have any way to record a history? I’m asking because I don’t know.