Star wars, cyber wars and water wars - the so-called wars of future are already upon us. Pakistan is fighting all three but reports from the battlefronts are not very encouraging. The CIA-operated drones give us the foretaste of a star war. India has imposed a water war on us by stealing our Himalayan waters. And how completely exposed to the prying eyes we as individuals and as a polity are, information has been released by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. In effect, the NSA tracks all our phone calls, monitors e-mails and internet traffic day in day out.
According to the agency's own admission, after Iran Pakistan is the extensively and intensively snooped and spied country. So if anyone with green phone or white one, or using computer - and this includes all our 11 intelligence agencies, let alone communications between people in high offices - is as exposed to the NSA as one would be before his bathroom mirror. That's indeed a superior gene of George Orwell's 'Big Brother' now stalking the Earth. We in Pakistan were never sanguine about our confidentiality.
Only a year or so back the WikiLeaks uncovered quite a bit of ugly side of our governance. But what we have now is simply frightening; the American surveillance collected 13.5 billion reports about us in Pakistan that's mind-boggling. True no one in America reads these reports, but only when he needs to do it. In case it is needed the desired information is available in real time. Admitted, in the United States the people too are upset and angry that their privacy is being violated - to be assuaged by President Obama that the NSA is not spying on the US citizens, "but looking for information on terrorists". And the NSA has been able to water down their Senators' annoyance as "dozens of terrorist attacks were thwarted". On the face of it, or at least it's not in public knowledge that the America's National Security Agency has helped avert any terrorist attack in Pakistan. One can't help admiring the courage of 28-year-old Edward Snowden who "in good conscience" couldn't allow the US government "to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties of people around the world with massive surveillance machine". And these people around the world include Pakistanis. That the Foreign Office protest feebly conveyed to the US deputy chief of mission has yet to receive a response, others in the country are not that complacent. Pakistan Information Security Association (Pisa) has been requested by Senator Mushahid Hussain to help him draft a private-member's bill to check this online espionage. He said he would be also seeking allocation of funds for setting up a cyber task force which should devise appropriate cyber security policy strategy. If the government doesn't have such a mechanism already in place then it's a huge omission, given the common phenomenon of states engaging in cyber warfare instead of using weapons or putting boots on ground. And that the kind of intelligence reserve the NSA is building is also being done by many other countries. We have this admission recently by the British government. Given Pakistan's critical geo-strategic location and its clout as a nuclear weapon state, there is every reason to believe that the hostile states are all the time working to break into its intelligence networks. One is generally optimistic of its agencies' competence to block intrusions: but we can't be oblivious of the scale of effort being made against them. But what about the right of the private citizens whose privacy is now being held hostage by the NSA and CIA? Heretical it may be to celebrate the 'great escape' of Snowden, but it can't be denied that he had a cause and for a private individual to stand on his side of the legal-moral divide should not be a big issue.
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