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| Chilling Effects Clearinghouse > Weather Reports > It's June, 2013: Is Big Brother Watching You? | Location: https://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=765 |
Maria Serena Ciaburri, June 17, 2013
Abstract: On June 6, 2013 The Guardian and The Washington Post published some top secret documents belonging to the NSA (National Security Agency) about the relationship between the US government and some of the most famous tech companies like Facebook, Google, AOL, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo.
This document shows how the government collects data from these giants of online communications and analyzes them. This inflammatory document, as well as many others, apparently, was leaked by Edward Snowden, a former CIA technical assistant.
It seems that Snowden got the material related to a NSA secret project called PRISM. This project apparently gave free access to the government to Internet users’ metadata such as live chats, email contents and file transfers, making it able to monitor a large part of the online traffic. The former CIA assistant is now most likely in Honk Kong, waiting to be granted the political asylum in Iceland after the disclosure of these governmental secrets. The disclosure of such information seems to be connected to the scandal about Verizon. In few words, in April the government asked to this telephone company to provide to the NSA all the data related to the domestic and international phone calls made by the company’s users until July.
On Friday, June 7, 2013, Facebook and Google talked about the PRISM news respectively on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page and on Google’s official blog. Both of these companies wrote that they had never heard about PRISM before, that they had never collaborated with the government in this way and that they had never received requests like Verizon had. In particular, Zuckerberg wrote: “When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law”.
In this statement the creator of Facebook refers to FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), a law established in 1978 during the first President Bush’s presidency. With that law the government can send to a tech company a request about some specific data upon a user or a topic and if the lawyers of the company consider the request lawful, the company has to deliver these data to the government. This law was passed to increase national security but, as reported by The Guardian, the PRISM project sounds totally different. According to the information contained in the top secret documents in fact, the government did not ask for specific information, but it had free access to a huge amount of data and can constantly control it. We are talking about an automatic process, completely different from the FISA one.
On Friday, June 7, President Obama defended the PRISM in a speech saying that the program is authorized by the Congress and that it is a good help in the prevention of terroristic attacks. He underlined that the surveillance programs don’t interfere with people’s privacy: “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program was about. As indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But, by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism”. The President also said: “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience”. At this point, the events are unclear and the truth swings between the biggest privacy abuse and the national defense.
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