Everyone is under surveillance and we have to live with the curse. Every citizen on this earth has to survive with biometric identity.The government of India would not accept this. But the first person of the Global Order, yes, Obama accepts this!U.S. has access to the servers of nine Internet companies as part of top-secret effort.

The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency collects data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

Palash Biswas

Skype:palash.biswas44

How to protect your PC from PRISM surveillance | PCWorld
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PRISM (surveillance program) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)‎
PRISM is an electronic surveillance program, classified as top secret, that has been run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007. PRISM ...

Graphic

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program

Timeline of surveillance

Everyone is under surveillance and we have to live with the curse. Every citizen on this earth has to survive with biometric identity.The government of India would not accept this. But the first person of the Global Order, yes, Obama accepts this!Simply the secrecy maintained blunts legalities worldwide and human rights remain suspended along with all democratic norms. At least, Obama must be thanked for speaking out the truth, but we Indians have to bear illegal biometric corporate identity without knowing anything and we happen to be under acute surveillance without being aware of it. UID project is a surveillance mission basically introduced by Nato and even not adopted by America or England but it has been imposed upon us and every basic service, financial transaction is associated with it violating Indian constitution! Indians could soon see a repeat of the US scandal of the National Security Agency snooping into phone conversations and social networking accounts, play out in domestic shores.

U.S. has access to the servers of nine Internet companies as part of top-secret effort.The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.Declassified documents show that since at least 1997, the NSA has been charged with developing ways to attack hostile computer networks. For example, the Stuxnet virus, developed to damage Iran's nuclear programs, was a collaboration between scientists and technicians at the NSA and their counterparts within the espionage apparatus of the Israeli government, according to U.S. officials.The NSA's main mission remains collecting and analyzing electronic data. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the agency has increasingly focused on protecting U.S. government computer networks.

The Indian government's recently rolled out Central Monitoring System (CMS), which enables it to monitor phone and internet communications across the country, has drawn flak from human rights groups that worry it could undermine citizens' right to privacy and free expression.

The government's CMS under the aegis of the ministry of communications and information technology was rolled out in April 2013 and allows state monitoring of phone calls, text messages and internet use of citizens. This has been facilitated by the Information Technology Act 2008 which allows interception under specific conditions such as for the defence or security of India or public order, among other conditions.

In America,Members of Congress and The White House are defending a top secret NSA program that continues to collect data from millions of phone records, but civil liberties supporters remain skeptical.

Many Americans are outraged at the government for mining user data from Apple, Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants. What about the actions of the companies themselves -- have they met their ethical obligations to their customers and society as a whole? Do they even have any?

The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency collects data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. While some companies issued carefully worded denials of involvement, it's hard to imagine they were unaware of the arrangement, however they choose to describe it.

Assuming that the companies found the program an infringement on our liberties, could they have declined to provide the government the information it requested? Ultimately, probably not; it seems unlikely they would have met the requests had they not faced a legal obligation to comply. But legal and ethical obligations aren't necessarily the same thing.

Take the recent case of Apple's use of Irish subsidiaries with no tax residency to avoid U.S. taxes; the tactics may be legally sound, but ethically dubious. Now turn that around: If companies are willing to go to such lengths to get around U.S. tax law, is it too much to ask that they apply the same creativity to avoiding the surrender of their customers' private information?

In Apple's case, that may have happened. Apple looks to have resisted the government's requests for years. What does that say about other companies, which complied more quickly: Are they better corporate citizens, or worse?

The role and obligation of the corporation in American society is an unsettled question. When Mitt Romney proclaimed that "corporations are people" in 2011, he sparked a combination of ridicule and outrage. But Apple, Facebook and Google occupy an increasing space in popular culture, and they're judged not only for the products they sell or the profits they generate, but also the way they treat their workers, pay their taxes and even design their headquarters.

The surveillance debate raises the question of whether our expectations of these companies and their leaders should also extend to the defense of our civil rights. Imagine, for an instant, that Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg had held a press conference in 2007, when the government first began seeking this access, and said to the public, "The government has asked for your information, and we don't think that's right."

Faced with that kind of corporate civil disobedience, what would the government have done? Arrested them? Closed down their operations? Taken the companies over? It seems unlikely. More likely, the government would have backed down, at least temporarily. And the next time Congress tried to co-opt the nation's most prominent companies in its intelligence gathering, it might have thought twice.

The point isn't that these companies should have stopped this program from starting. It is that they probably had the power to do so, when so few others had that power. The line about great power and great responsibility is apt: Does the ethical burden increase with the consequences of a company's decisions?

This week's revelations demonstrate the centrality of Silicon Valley to American life, in ways we never imagined. In the face of that expanded role, maybe it's time to revisit what it means for a company to be a good corporate citizen, and whether that includes acting as a check on the government when no one else can.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

The National Security Agency, nicknamed "No Such Agency" because of its ultra-secrecy, is the government's eavesdropper-in-chief.

Charged primarily with electronic spying around the globe, the NSA collects billions of pieces of intelligence from foreign phone calls, e-mail and other communications. But in the past two days, the focus has shifted to its role in compiling massive amounts of the same information on millions of ordinary Americans.

For instance,all three branches of government have a hand in the surveillance measures enacted to protect Americans from terrorism, but the need for secrecy and formidable legal obstacles have blunted challenges about their legal foundation and constitutionality.

This week's disclosures about government surveillance of phone calls and Internet data led President Obama on Friday to try to reassure the public that programs initiated to keep tabs on foreign terrorism suspects are not compromising Americans' right to privacy.

The agency is so secretive that estimates of the number of employees range from the official figure of about 35,000 to as high as 55,000. In addition to its main campus behind the walls of Fort Meade, the NSA will operate a new surveillance center in the Utah desert. The million-square-foot building will cost about $2 billion when it's finished, perhaps as early as the fall.

The center is designed to capture all forms of communication for the nation's intelligence agencies, ranging from e-mail and cellphone calls to Internet searches and personal data. James Bamford, a best-selling author who has written extensively about the NSA in books with telling titles including "The Puzzle Palace" and "The Shadow Factory," has estimated the surveillance center could store data equal to 500 quintillion pages.

However,President Obama on Friday defended the government's collection of data on the phone records of millions of Americans, saying that it was a modest encroachment on privacy and one he thinks is both lawful and justified in order to identify terrorists plotting to attack the United States.Speaking to members of the press Friday, President Obama sought to assure Americans that the government collects telephone call durations and numbers but not content.President says there are "a whole bunch of safeguards involved" and that Congress authorized programs.

A leading global rights organization has serious doubts over the intent of India'sCentral Monitoring System (CMS) and has asked the government to enact clear laws to ensure that increased surveillance of phonesand the internet does not undermine rights to privacy and free expression.

In April 2013, the India began rolling out the CMS which will enable the government to monitor all phone and the internet communications. The CMS will provide centralized access to the country's telecommunications network and facilitate direct monitoring of phone calls, text messages, and the internet use by government agencies, bypassing service providers.

Cynthia Wong from Human Rights Watchcalled the CMC a chilling threat "given its reckless and irresponsible use of the sedition and the internet laws".

"New surveillance capabilities have been used around the world to target critics, journalists, and human rights activists." Wong added "Surveillance tools are often used by governments and bureaucrats for political reasons instead of security purposes, and often in a covert way that violates human rights. If India doesn't want to look like an authoritarian regime, it needs to be transparent about who will be authorized to collect data, what data will be collected, how it will be used and how the right to privacy will be protected." The ministry of communications and information technology announced in January 2011 that "steps will be taken to establish the CMS, which will facilitate and prevent misuse of lawful interception facility".

However, the government has released very little information about this. India at present does not have in place a privacy law to protect against arbitrary intrusions.

Two laws address interception or access to communication data.

HRW says the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, allows the government to "intercept, monitor, or decrypt" any information "generated, transmitted, received, or stored in any computer resource" in the interest of "sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence."

The colonial Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, also allows wire-tapping in conformity with guidelines that are supposed to act as a check on indiscriminate interception by the law enforcement agencies.

An expert group chaired by retired Justice A P Shah was created by the Planning Commission to set out principles for an Indian privacy law.

In its report in October 2012, it concluded that the two laws were inconsistent on the "permitted grounds for surveillance, the type of interception that is permitted to be undertaken (monitoring, tracking, intercepting), the type and granularity of information that can be intercepted, the degree of assistance that authorized agencies can demand from service providers, and the destruction and retention requirements of intercepted material."

These differences, it concluded, "have created an unclear regulatory regime that is nontransparent, prone to misuse, and that does not provide remedy for aggrieved individuals."

Because the CMS was created without parliamentary approval, the government should convene a full public debate about the intended use of the system before proceeding.

UID will result in loss of freedoms: WikiLeaks backer

The establishment of a centralised database of Indian citizens such as the Unique Identification (UID) project will result in the loss of freedoms on a "societal scale," according to Jacob Appelbaum, a staunch supporter of the WikiLeaks project.

Addressing a small gathering of hacking enthusiasts here late on Tuesday, Mr. Appelbaum, an associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said he was "horrified" by the establishment in India of the Central Monitoring System (CMS), which was being used to gather a diverse range of analogue and digital information, including telephone records, text messages and Internet traffic. "We live in the golden age of surveillance," said Mr. Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen who has been detained by U.S. law-enforcement agencies on at least a dozen occasions.

"The problem with the Unique Identification (UID) system or the CMS is not that it will not be perfect," but the fact that it would result in people being forced to "behave differently" because they would be under surveillance or have to live in fear of it. "This amounts to a loss of freedom," he argued. "To watch is to control, and surveillance is a kind of control."

Warning of the possibilities of data theft, Mr. Appelbaum said that though "fingerprint lifting may appear far-fetched now," techniques for enabling "transferable fingerprints" were being discussed in the public realm. Iris scans, he told The Hindu, were also "far from being foolproof."

"These are things that deserve resistance, not protest, because protest happens when you do not go along with something," he said. "Resistance, on the other hand, happens when you stop others from going along." "I also think we need to build alternatives to these systems."

Though he conceded that there might be a need for citizen identification systems in society, he argued that centralising them posed grave dangers to the freedom of citizens. "When we centralise the collection of information, we actually centralise the place that an attacker would like to attack to gain control of society," Mr. Appelbaum said.

The "intentions" of those in authority do not matter because "general purpose information systems" were difficult to protect. "We can try, but there is a threshold of attack, where someone will probably win." "If there are valid concerns of national security, espionage or terrorism, does it make sense to make a centralised system with all the records of usage of phones, Internet browsing, emails, fingerprints?" "Doing this may result in losses on a societal scale," he said.

Mr. Appelbaum, co-author, with Mr. Assange, of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the future of the Internet, said "dragnet surveillance" systems amounted to "a tyranny of sorts."

Example from Nazi Germany

Arguing against the notion that technology is benign, Mr. Appelbaum recalled the use of punching card technologies deployed by the Nazi regime in Germany to target Jews, Communists and others social groups. The machines enabled the regime to determine how many Jews or Communists lived in a particular residential block, he said. "We can understand from the past what possibilities exist in the future for surveillance," he said. "In fact, when people suggest that surveillance causes no harm, they are denying history."

He recalled the "Athens Incident" of 2004, when the telephone switches leading to the Prime Minister and a number of Greek parliamentarians were subjected to wiretapping with "interception systems." He pointed out that telephone-switching standards established in the U.S. were mimicked all over the world. "There is a trickledown effect in all this. So, Greece gets them [interception systems] just the same way as Iran gets them, and just about the way the U.S. has them," Mr. Appelbaum said.

"The theory goes that the FBI [the Federal Bureau of Investigation], which is legitimate, goes to a court and never abuses its authority, and so everything is fine." But the "backdoors" built into these switches made them vulnerable to anyone who might have access to the switch through a computer network.

Internet freedom

"In theory, the Internet allows us to be free, but the fact that almost by default, the Internet is not secure implies a breakdown of this freedom," Mr. Appelbaum said. "This results in a strange situation: people have the freedom to communicate and say what they want, but does the surveillance actually allow them to be free?"

An expert hacker, Mr. Appelbaum said: "Technology is quite boring, when compared with the richness of societies." Urging the audience to read his book, he said: "You have my blessings to download it from Pirate Bay."

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/uid-will-result-in-loss-of-freedoms-wikileaks-backer/article4763595.ece

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Surveillance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Surveillance (disambiguation).

A 'nest' of surveillance cameras at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts

Surveillance (/sərˈveɪ.əns / or /sərˈveɪləns /)[1] is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting.[2] Surveillance is therefore an ambiguous practice, sometimes creating positive effects, at other times negative. It is sometimes done in a surreptitious manner. It most usually involves observation of individuals or groups bygovernment organizations (though there are some exceptions, such as disease surveillance, which monitors the progress of a disease in a community without for that matter directly observing or monitoring individuals).

The word surveillance is the French word for "watching over"; "sur" means "from above" and "veiller" means "to watch". The inverse (reciprocal) of surveillance is sousveillance("to watch from below").[3] The word surveillance may be applied to observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment (such as CCTV cameras), or interception of electronically transmitted information (such as Internet traffic or phone calls). It may also refer to simple, relatively no- or low-technology methods such as human intelligence agents and postal interception.

Surveillance is very useful to governments and law enforcement to maintain social control, recognize and monitor threats, and prevent/investigate criminal activity. With the advent of programs such as the Total Information Awareness program and ADVISE, technologies such as high speed surveillance computers and biometrics software, and laws such as the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, governments now possess an unprecedented ability to monitor the activities of their subjects.[4]

However, many civil rights and privacy groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union, have expressed concern that by allowing continual increases in government surveillance of citizens we will end up in a mass surveillancesociety, with extremely limited, or non-existent political and/or personal freedoms. Fears such as this have led to numerous lawsuits such as Hepting v. AT&T.[4][5]

[hide]

1 Types of surveillance

2 Controversy surrounding surveillance

Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush's approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing.PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush's secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular "target" and "facility" were both connected to terrorism or espionage.

In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as "facilities" and agreed to certify periodically that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of "U.S. persons" data without a warrant.

Obama emphasized that the government does not collect information on individual callers or eavesdrop on Americans' conversations without a warrant. He said he would welcome a debate on the classified surveillance effort as well as the previously secret workings of a second program that gathers the e-mails and other digital content of targeted foreigners outside the United States from major American Internet companies.

The programs "make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity," Obama said.

Revelations about the programs in The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper have opened up a debate that previously had been limited to the cryptic warnings of some members of Congress who were briefed on but troubled by the surveillance efforts. Some lawmakers who do not serve on the intelligence committees said they had no knowledge of the programs.

"Did I know about it? No, I didn't," said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who said he was unconvinced by the president's assurances that surveillance efforts are constrained by congressional oversight and the federal courts. "That's the lawyer in him speaking. . . . The way bureaucracies work, we stumble into invasions of privacy. We want information it's unwise to seek or to possess."

The National Security Agency acknowledges that Americans' communications can be inadvertently collected, but U.S. intelligence agencies have declined to provide Congress with an estimate on how often that has happened, despite repeated requests for that information.

In his remarks, Obama said it was "healthy for our democracy" to have an open discussion about the balance between privacy and security concerns but also said he rued the leaks of classified information that prompted the current debate.

"If every step that we're taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or on television, then presumably the people who are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventive measures," Obama said during an event in Northern California. "That's why these things are classified. But that's also why we've set up congressional oversight. These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they're being fully briefed on these programs."

The Obama administration has aggressively pursued leak investigations. In one case, it swept up the phone records of Associated Press journalists; in another, it identified a Fox News journalist as a "co-conspirator" for soliciting classified information.

The career intelligence officer who disclosed details of the online data-mining program to The Post said he acted out of a sense that the NSA has exceeded the privacy expectations of Americans. The source thinks he is likely to be exposed and is prepared for that possibility. One Justice official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the department is at "the start of the process" of determining if an investigation of the leaks is appropriate.

Graphic

The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court

"What you've got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress, bipartisan majorities have approved them, Congress is continually briefed on how these are conducted . . . and federal judges are overseeing the entire program throughout," Obama said.

But Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said the revelations that the government secured telephone records from Verizon and Internet data from some of the largest providers proved the opposite.

"It confirms the safeguards that are supposed to be protecting individual privacy are not working," he said.

Jaffer learned firsthand the difficulty of litigating challenges that arise from the system of warrantless surveillance initiated by the George W. Bush administration and embraced by the Obama administration.

Jaffer represented a group of lawyers and journalists challenging a 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the interception of electronic communications between foreign targets and people in the United States. It allows national security officials to obtain authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to track suspects for up to one year.

The Supreme Court split along ideological grounds in ruling 5 to 4 that because the group could not prove that its communications had been intercepted, its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law could not go forward.

The challengers, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the conservative majority, "can only speculate as to how the attorney general and the director of national intelligence will exercise their discretion in determining which communications to target."

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the liberal dissenters, said the majority was wrong to accept the government's view that the challengers' belief that their communications were intercepted was "speculative."

"We need only assume that the government is doing its job (to find out about, and combat, terrorism) in order to conclude that there is a high probability that the government will intercept at least some electronic communication to which at least some of the plaintiffs are parties," he wrote.

In an interview Friday, Jaffer said: "It turns out the kind of things the government said were only speculative were in fact going on at the same time."

Still, the question in that case was whether the lawsuit could continue, not about underlying questions about the program's legality.

Britain getting data from US National Security Agency: Report

Britain's Guardian newspaper says that the UK government has been secretly gathering communications data from American Internet giants through the medium of the US National Security Agency.

The paper says that it has seen documents showing how the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ has had access to America's "Prism" system since at least June 2010.

It says the program has generated 197 intelligence reports in the past year.

GCHQ declined to comment on the story Friday, saying only that it takes its legal obligations "very seriously."

The Guardian has recently published a series of stories on America's secret surveillance dragnet, revealing the stunning details of an undisclosed intelligence operation targeting millions of Americans' phone, email, and Internet records.

Facebook and Google insist they did not know of Prism surveillance program

Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg sharply deny knowledge of Prism until Thursday even as Obama confirms program's existence

America's tech giants continued to deny any knowledge of a giant government surveillance programme called Prism, even as presidentBarack Obama confirmed the scheme's existence Friday.

With their credibility about privacy issues in sharp focus, all the technology companies said to be involved in the program issued remarkably similar statements.

All said they did not allow the government "direct access" to their systems, all said they had never heard of the Prism program, and all called for greater transparency.

In a blogpost titled 'What the…?' Google co-founder Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond said the "level of secrecy" around US surveillance procedures was undermining "freedoms we all cherish."

"First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers. Indeed, the US 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," they wrote.

"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."

The Google executives said they were also "very surprised" to learn of the government order made to obtain data from Verizon, first disclosed by the Guardian. "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false," they wrote.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, described the press reports about Prism as "outrageous". He insisted that the Facebook was not part of any program to give the US government direct access to its servers.

He said: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of Prism before yesterday."

Zuckerberg also called for greater transparency. "We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term."

Yahoo said: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."

The leaked National Security Agency (NSA) document obtained by the Guardian claims Prism operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US".

The document names AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk and Yahoo and gives dates when they "joined" the scheme, aimed at intercepting data from people outside the US.'' The presentation talks of "legally compelled collection" of data.

All the companies involved have now denied knowledge of the scheme to the Guardian.

In one slide, the presentation identifies two types of data collection: Upstream and Prism. Upstream involves the collection of communications on "fibre cables and infrastructure as data flows past." Prism involves: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

Obama confirmed the existence of the scheme Friday and said Congress was "fully apprised" of the situation and that it was being conducted legally with a "whole range of safeguards involved".

But despite Obama's acknowledgment, senior figures said they remained puzzled and surprised by the news. Speaking off the record one said their company regularly complied with subpoenas for information but had never allowed "collection directly" from their servers.

Some speculated that the wording of the document was incorrect or that the author had over-hyped the scheme.

Security experts and civil liberty figures were less convinced. "I was assuming that these tech companies were just lying," said security guru Bruce Schneier. "That's the most obvious explanation."

"Could it possibly be that there's a department within these companies that hides this from the executives? Maybe," he said. "I don't know, we don't know. This points to the problem here. There's so much freaking secrecy that we don't know enough to even know what is going on."

He said he was not surprised by the news. "There are no surprises here. We all knew what was going on and now they have finally admitted it."

"The NSA would not have done this surreptitiously, they want the tech companies on their side," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "I can't make sense of their statements at all."

He said it was clear that tech companies in general were more than happy to co-operate with the US authorities and said he was puzzled why there seemed to be such a gap between the two sides' story.

Ali Reza Manouchehri, CEO and co-founder of MetroStar Systems, an IT consultant that works closely with government agencies, said: "There are situations that come up where they have to communicate with the security agencies. At the end of the day they are working in the interest of national security."

"I can't comment on what's going on inside the company. It's hard for me to believe that Google doesn't know," he said. "It is either transparent or it is surreptitious. It is hard for me to believe that at this level, at this volume it is surreptitious." He said if the companies really did not know then "we have some serious issues."

The news has sparked widespread concern in the US. Nearly 20,000 people have signed a petition at Progressive Change Campaign Committee calling on Congress to hold investigations.

News
Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks
Exclusive: Top-secret directive steps up offensive cyber capabilities to 'advance US objectives around the world' Obama tells intelligence chiefs to draw up cyber target list – full document text
Clapper admits secret NSA surveillance programme to access user data
British ministers challenged over GCHQ's access to covert US operation
Barack Obama and Xi Jinping meet as cyber-scandals swirl
US intelligence chief denounces release of information
Prism scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers
NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal
Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily
Obama administration defends NSA collection of Verizon phone records
Court order forcing Verizon to hand over call data 'in place since 2006'
Comment
Glenn Greenwald: on whistleblowers and government threats of investigation
No healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable
Jonathan Freedland:Obama is like Apple, Google and Facebook: a once hip brand tainted by Prism
Editorial: GCHQ and the American data trough
Jonathan Turley:Obama's Verizon surveillance reveals massive erosion of US civil liberties
James Ball: telephone metadata and what it can tell the authorities about you
Richard Seymour:Obama's Verizon phone records collection carries on Bush's work
Simon Jenkins:Osama bin Laden would love this
Analysis
The National Security Agency: surveillance giant with eyes on America
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/google-facebook-prism-surveillance-program

PRISM (surveillance program)

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*	This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses. (June 2013)

Slide from a leaked NSA presentation explaining the PRISM electronic surveillance program.

PRISM is an electronic surveillance program, classified as top secret, that has been run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007.[1][2] PRISM is a government codename for a collection effort known officially as US-984XN.[3][4]

Officials confirmed the existence of PRISM and said that the program is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress.[2] Reports based on leaked documents describe the PRISM program as enabling in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information.[5] It provides for the targeting of any customers of participating corporations who live outside the United States, or American citizens whose communications include people outside the USA.[5] Data that the NSA is able to obtain under PRISM allegedly includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice over IPconversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details.[5]

The Washington Post noted that the leaked document indicated that the PRISM SIGAD is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports."[6] The President's Daily Brief, an all-source intelligence product, cited PRISM data as a source in 1,477 items in 2012.[7]

The leaked information came to light one day after the revelation that the U.S. government had secretly been requiring the telecommunications company Verizon to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls on an ongoing daily basis.[8][2]

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History[edit]

Slide showing that much of the world's communications flow through the US.

PRISM replaced the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which was implemented in the wake of the September 11 attacks under the George W. Bush Administration. While the Terrorist Surveillance Program was widely criticized and had its legality questioned because it was not conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,[9][10][11][12] PRISM was authorized by an order of the Court.[6] The NSA continues to operate PRISM throughout the Obama Administration.[5]

PRISM was first publicly revealed on June 6, 2013, after classified documents about the program were leaked to the Washington Post [1] and The Guardian.[5] The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including (date of joining PRISM in parentheses) Microsoft (2007), Yahoo! (2008), Google (2009),Facebook (2009), Paltalk (2009), YouTube (2010), AOL (2011), Skype (2011), and Apple(2012).[13] The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by the Washington Postindicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft."[1]

The documents included a slide presentation which stated that much of the world's electronic communications pass through the United States because electronic communications data will tend to follow the least expensive route rather than the most physically direct route and the bulk of the world's internet infrastructure is based in the U.S.[6] The presentation noted that these facts provide U.S. intelligence analysts with opportunities for intercepting the communications of foreign targets as their electronic data pass into or through the U.S.[6][5] According to the Washington Post, the intelligence analysts search PRISM data using terms intended to identify electronic data of targets whom the analysts suspect with at least 51 percent confidence are not U.S. citizens, but in the process unintentionally gather up electronic data of some U.S citizens as well.[1] Training materials for analysts tell them that while they should periodically report such accidental collection of non-foreign U.S. data, "it's nothing to worry about."[1]

Details of information collected via PRISM.

Former employees of the National Security Agency added further information:[14][15]

In an interview on ABC News in January 2006 NSA whistleblower Russ Tice stated "...the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used. That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum."[16]
In an interview on RT in December 2012 NSA whistleblower William Binney had stated "...the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they've done for the last 10 years at least."[17] On June 6, 2013 he estimated that the NSA also collects records on 3 billion calls per day.[18]

In a technology conference in March 2013, Ira "Gus" Hunt, the Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)[19] stated "The government collects vast amounts of data that become valuable when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever – forever being in quotes, of course".[20]

Response from companies[edit]

Slide listing which companies and the date at which they joined PRISM.

Corporate executives of several companies identified in the leaked documents told The Guardian that they had no knowledge of the PRISM program in particular.[5][21] Statements of several of the companies named in the leaked documents were reported by TechCrunchas follows:[22]

Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."[22]

Google: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review 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."[22]

Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."[23]

Microsoft: "We provide 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."[22]

Yahoo!: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."[22]

Dropbox: "We've seen reports that Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to protecting our users' privacy."[22]

The Associated Press pointed out that these company denials were "carefully worded" to be technically true and yet make it impossible to determine how much information was actually provided to the NSA. Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that: "A company could say 'We've never heard of the PRISM program.' Well, maybe the government didn't call it that. Or the company could say 'We don't allow backdoor access!' Well, maybe they allow front door access."[24] Bloomberg Newsnoted that "it's hard to imagine" the companies "were unaware of the arrangement, however they choose to describe it."[25]

In response to the technology companies' denials of the NSA being able to directly access the companies' servers, the New York Times reported that sources had stated the NSA was gathering the surveillance data from the companies using other technical means in response to court orders for specific sets of data.[2] The Washington Post suggested, "It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing 'collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,' rather than directly to company servers."[1] "If these companies received an order under the FISA amendments act, they are forbidden by law from disclosing having received the order and disclosing any information about the order at all," Mark Rumold, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told ABC News.[26]

On May 28, 2013, Google was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston to comply with National Security Letters issued by the FBI to provide user data without a warrant.[27] Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with VentureBeat said "I certainly appreciate that Google put out a transparency report, but it appears that the transparency didn't include this. I wouldn't be surprised if they were subject to a gag order."[28]

Response from U.S. government[edit]

Shortly after publication of the reports by the Guardian and the Washington Post, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released a statement confirming that for nearly 6 years the government of the United States had been using large internet services companies such as Google and Facebook to collect information on foreigners outside the U.S. as a defense against national security threats.[2] The statement read in part, "The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies."[29] He went on to say, "Section 702 is a provision of FISA that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States. It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States."[29] Clapper concluded his statement by stating "The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans."[29] On March 12, 2013, Clapper had told the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA does "not wittingly" collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.[30]

Investigative journalist Russ Baker has commented on the government statement in an interview on RT "Claims that the NSA is not spying on Americans are absurd because anybody could potentially commit a terrorist act. The reality is they're looking at all of us. They're trying to establish networks of communication but it's kind of ridiculous because you're looking for a needle in a haystack. You're looking at virtually the entire world trying to find just a handful of plots and, as we know, many of these plots turn out to be more complicated, with FBI informants involved right from the beginning."[31]

President Obama defended the government's surveillance programs, saying that they were legally authorized and had helped prevent terrorist attacks.[32] "What you've got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress. Bipartisan majorities have approved them. Congress is continually briefed on how these are conducted. There are a whole range of safeguards involved. And federal judges are overseeing the entire program throughout."[32] He also said that having a debate about how to balance security issues with privacy concerns is healthy for democratic government, but he cautioned, "You can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."[32]

In contrast to their swift and forceful reactions the previous day to allegations that the government had been conducting surveillance of U.S. citizens' telephone records, Congressional leaders had little to say about the PRISM program the day after leaked information about the program was published.[33] Several lawmakers declined to discuss PRISM, citing its top-secret classification,[33] and others said that they had not been aware of the program.[34]