"Don worry. You can trust us." This is the crux of the defense United States President Barack Obama offered last Friday amid leaks about the National Security Agencys (NSA) massive cyber snooping programme. Since the NSAs main mandate is to collect and analyse foreign intelligence, Obama was clearly reassuring his domestic audience which is concerned about privacy issues after recent surfacing of various surveillance scandals.
The source of the leaks is no longer anonymous. Britains Guardian newspaper, which broke the story last week, has now revealed Edward Snowden, who is a 29-year-old former CIA employee currently on the payroll of a major defense contractor.
Based on material provided by the whistleblower, Guardian reported that the surveillance programme, PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management) helps the NSA to "reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users."
Names of nine tech companies have been linked to this programme, including giants like Microsoft (Hotmail and Skype), Google (Gmail, YouTube, etc.), Yahoo, Facebook, and Apple. These companies have most of their users outside the US, but since their servers are located in the US, they have to provide access to NSAs secret orders under various surveillance laws.
Almost every online activity is swooped up by the NSA, though the tech companies have reportedly denied being part of this programme or opening up their servers to NSA through back doors.
The whistleblowers motivation seems to stem from his opinion that the US has become a surveillance state. Apparently, it is perfectly legal for the US government to put surveillance on foreigners, thanks to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 that was renewed in December last year. But Edward Snowden seems to suggest that the agency has been trespassing on domestic privacy, too.
In the words of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and NSA boss, the PRISM programme "cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States." Rather it is about "acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-US persons located outside the United States."
Put simply, Clapper is saying that nothing is off limits for the US government outside of the US cyberspace. This should disturb other governments. More so the individuals living outside the US, whose way of life and mode of work now increasingly depend on online connectivity. Apparently, big brother has been watching over them since 2007. One wonders if the watchdogs in the EU and UK were in on this.
The scale of snooping is stupendous. The Guardian also broke news about NSAs secret data mining tool, Boundless Informant which pieces together billions of intelligence shreds from programmes like PRISM. It wrote that in March, NSA collected 97 billion intelligence pieces worldwide. Around 13.5 billion pieces were collected from Pakistan, which closely followed Irans with 14 billion pieces.
The US administrations response seems focused on appeasing the US public, which indicates that they are not at all worried about any diplomatic upheaval or watchdog protests overseas. That may well mean that Uncle Sam will continue to have his eyes set on you, all of you, even if you don trust him!
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