“We really need to wake up,” she said. “This is serious stuff. The government knowing everything, literally everything about us, and we are unable to exercise any meaningful democratic scrutiny? That is not a democracy.”
When details emerged last week about the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance system PRISM, President Obama attempted to reassure Americans that it was not being used to target them. Instead, he implied, it is aimed at the other 95 percent of the world’s population.
The PRISM system, according to a set of leaked top-secret PowerPoint slides, enables the NSA to obtain private emails and other user data directly from the central servers of major Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. The companies named as part of the program initially denied involvement, but some anonymous executives have since acknowledged the system’s existence, saying it is used to share information about foreign customers with the NSA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. At the heart of the PRISM story is a scandal that is not domestic but global.
The existence of PRISM provides vindication for privacy advocates worldwide who have been voicing alarm about the U.S. government’s ability to conduct mass surveillance of foreigners’ communications sent and received using services like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail and Skype. Earlier this year, a prescient report produced for the European Parliament warned that the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had authorized “purely political surveillance on foreigners' data” and could be used to secretly force U.S. cloud providers like Google to provide a live “wiretap” of European users’ communications. Full story...
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When details emerged last week about the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance system PRISM, President Obama attempted to reassure Americans that it was not being used to target them. Instead, he implied, it is aimed at the other 95 percent of the world’s population.
The PRISM system, according to a set of leaked top-secret PowerPoint slides, enables the NSA to obtain private emails and other user data directly from the central servers of major Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. The companies named as part of the program initially denied involvement, but some anonymous executives have since acknowledged the system’s existence, saying it is used to share information about foreign customers with the NSA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. At the heart of the PRISM story is a scandal that is not domestic but global.
The existence of PRISM provides vindication for privacy advocates worldwide who have been voicing alarm about the U.S. government’s ability to conduct mass surveillance of foreigners’ communications sent and received using services like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail and Skype. Earlier this year, a prescient report produced for the European Parliament warned that the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had authorized “purely political surveillance on foreigners' data” and could be used to secretly force U.S. cloud providers like Google to provide a live “wiretap” of European users’ communications. Full story...
Related posts:
- US: Surveillance, secret courts and death to whistleblowers...
- A bad month for privacy rights...
- Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations...
- " I am Bradley Manning"
- Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide...
- Technology giants struggle to maintain credibility over NSA Prism surveillance...
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