WASHINGTON: Uncle Sam is watching you…every electronic step you take, every digital move you make.
The world woke on Friday morning to news that the US government’s surveillance of people is much broader, wider, and deeper than initially thought and extends beyond America – into the whole world.
For the last six years, the secretive National Security Agency (NSA) has been able to pluck data – including e-mails, videos, pictures, social networking details, and connection logs – from the main servers of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Skype and other leading US tech companies. Its collection of metadata from Verizon is just the tip of the iceberg that is drifting towards the Obama administration.
The newly disclosed US program, leaked by a disgruntled insider in the government, is named PRISM, which originally – and innocuously – stood for Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata, a norm for aggregating content. It has now acquired sinister tones with the disclosure that is a highly-classified, top-secret electronic surveillance program that allows targeting of any customers of participating corporations who live outside the United States, or American citizens whose communications include people outside the USA.
This pretty much means the entire world, since most of the world’s Internet infrastructure is based in the US and most the world’s electronic communications also pass through the US, not to speak of the worldwide dominance of the aforementioned US companies. According to the Guardian and the Washington Post, recipients of the explosive leak, PRISM is “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports” and “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.”
PRISM is not illegal, at least not under domestic US law. It actually replaced the Bush administration’s post-9/11 Terrorist Surveillance Program, whose legality was questioned. PRISM on the other hand is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, which is why both the administration and many lawmakers rushed to defend it.
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, issued a statement saying media reports about PRISM contained numerous inaccuracies, but did not deny its existence. Referring to the collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act cited in the reports, Clapper said the FISA provision is “designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the U.S It cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States.”
Meantime, the tech giants cited in the reports also rushed to distance themselves from the program, telling the site TechCrunch they had no knowledge of PRISM and they would never cooperate with it if it is not within the bounds of law.
Google said it cares deeply about the security of our users’ data and it only discloses user data to government in accordance with the law after reviewing all such requests carefully. “From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data,” Google said.
Microsoft was equally circumspect, saying it provides customer data “only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”
Still, the story broke like a thunderclap over Washington DC, rained in on Friday due to a storm system, adding to the Obama administration’s woes on the civil liberties front.
Source From: Times of India