Lately, the US government got itself involved in another crisis. Roughly at the same time, two newspapers published stories that were related to institutionalised invasion of privacy. The first one described how NSA - National Security Agency - got a court order demanding telephonic records from all of Verizon’s clientele. The second exposed a top-secret report, which detailed a program called PRISM and its direct access to several Internet databases. Barack Obama has defended his administration, by claiming that surveillance was necessary in order to guarantee a safe country. Web-based companies, however, declined to have cooperated with NSA on this matter. What is the controversy related to the investigation of possible security threats?
In 2001, the Patriot Act was signed into law by former president Bush. The regulations it determined were a response to 9/11. It’s main consequence had been the weakening of restrictions on the process of gathering information related to terrorists. Still, it represented even more. The Act opened the door for a series of privacy breaches, which reinforced the power of police institutions in American soil. Although this legislation was public, there was no knowledge about the myriad of other abuses committed by federal organizations until last week’s breakthroughs.
An order granted by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) obliged Verizon to provide NSA, in bulk, metadata information. This requirement allowed officials to analyse duration of calls, originating and terminating numbers, IMSI/IMEI numbers, among other things. All calls that either come from or are directed to US mainland fall into the scope of the Court’s decision. This should have been enough to raise concerns regarding excessive monitoring of citizens. Nonetheless, CIA employee Edward Snowden (currently in hiding) contributed to the chaos by disclosing more sensitive information.
Mr. Snowden’s actions consisted of sharing 41 PowerPoint slides with reporters from The Guardian and The Washington Post. The documents explained how PRISM (codename for US-984XN) worked. Even though only 4 of those slides were divulged publicly, one of them implicated several well-known enterprises in facilitating espionage. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple, for example, are told to have joined the project. No sooner has this hypothesis been brought to light, the companies issued formal statements to refuse any relation to the supposed surveillance network.
Google’s CEO Larry Page has posted a “press release” in the company’s official blog. For a corporation whose name is listed in a legitimate government presentation, this response is certainly suspicious:
“First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.
Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.”
Secret social monitoring is not something new, but it seems that, this time, the broad aspect of this activity plays an important role in sparking public repudiation. Protests are not exclusive to the US. In fact, Mr. Snowden’s disclosure of information had repercussions in Europe and Asia as well. People from China, Germany and Italy have already expressed their views about the disrespect of individual rights. Most of the manifestations criticized the fact that many peaceful citizens, without criminal records, are being spied on.
The court made specifically for providing subpoenas related to foreign threats, FISC, is said not to be what law enforcement needs in order to work successfully. Their argument is based on the amount of time needed to request and acquire legal consent on surveillance, often long enough to jeopardize operations. Moreover, it should be remembered that, many times, the panel of judges rejects wider solicitations instead of granting them, Thereby, the intelligence community has tried to circumvent constitutionality and find a way to do their jobs.
This is a major regression to the achievement of freedom rights in the US. Francis Bacon, English philosopher, has stated in the sixteenth century: “Knowledge is power”. 57 years later, Thomas Hobbes would use this same sentence in his masterpiece, Leviathan. Indeed, all information gathered by NSA does constitute a dilemma, because it provides the agency with inconceivable control of American lives. Even though surveillance is pivotal to secure the country, it should be done in an individual basis. The activity of monitoring large groups of people does not comply with the law. However, the remaining question is: Can Obama and his advisers obey the Constitution they have promised to respect?
Sources and related articles
Microsoft joins Google in calling for increased transparency of government data requests
Google says it has nothing to hide about government snooping
Obama administration defends massive phone record collection
The Tech Companies in PRISM Aren’t Telling the Complete Truth
Originally published on thimabi.wordpress.com.