Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who pulled back the curtain on the United States' internet surveillance programme Prism, has been
hailed as a hero by some, and labelled a traitor by others. His leaking of secret documents about the data monitoring machinery of the US secret intelligence agencies has sparked a huge controversy about privacy and liberty, both in the US and around the world. The story is continually evolving, but here are some of the important points and developments about Prism.
What is Prism?
Prism is a US government surveillance programme for collecting internet data, operated by the National Security Agency (NSA). In operation since 2007, it gives US intelligence operatives access to a wide range of private online information -- photos, emails, files -- including data from companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype and Apple. In essence, everything that you do online can be accessed, tracked and recorded by the US government.
How do we know about it?
The Guardian and Washington Post broke the news on 6 June. Journalists at those publications were sent a 43-page PowerPoint by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which detailed the surveillance programme.
Only a few of the slides have been published, one of which shows how different tech companies were signed up to the programme over a five-year period, beginning with Microsoft in 2007; Apple appears to have held out until October 2012.
The revelations came just a day after the Guardian reported that Verizon, the US network provider, had been ordered by a top secret court to hand over to the US government the phone records of millions of its customers.
Who is Edward Snowden?
Edward Snowden is the NSA contractor who blew the whistle on the programme. He is 29 years old, and gave up a $200,000 (£130,000) a year job in Hawaii to tell the world about Prism. In a Guardian interview from Hong Kong, where he has fled, he accused the NSA of being "intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them" and said he blew the whistle when he "realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
It's unclear what will happen to him now. Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States, but there are exceptions for cases "of a political nature" and if China, which owns the semi-autonomous island of Hong Kong, decides to involve itself, things could become yet more complicated.
So Facebook, Google and Apple have been giving the NSA free access to our information?
Not quite. When the news first broke on 6 June, it was claimed that the US government had direct access to the systems of major tech giants. That claim was strenuously denied by Google, Facebook and others who said that they only gave private data based on specific court orders relating to specific individuals, which is within US law. A report in the New York Times on 7 June suggested that Prism may be a programme for making it easier for these companies to comply with court orders for data, including by creating special government dropboxes for requested data.
The report also mentions that the programme allows for real-time monitoring of data.
It should be noted that Twitter, known for resisting requests for private data, was not mentioned in the Prism documents.
Is the Prism programme legal?
The US government claims that everything they have been doing has been with the knowledge of the US Congress, and with the approval of a top secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
However, while people are generally accepting of monitoring the communications of people suspected of serious crimes, it is claimed that Prism is being used indiscriminately, regardless of whether the targeted data belongs to a suspected terrorist, or to an innocent US citizen.
Of course, the Obama administration denies all of this. In a statement on 6 June, Obama called the reporting of the programme "hype" and added "you can't have a hundred percent security and also then have a hundred privacy and zero inconvenience."
The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper hammered home the denial, saying "it cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States".
What is the NSA?
The NSA is the United States' communications monitoring agency, similar to GCHQ in the UK. Founded in 1952, its existence wasn't publically known for over 20 years. It was tasked with monitoring foreign communications but it has been accused of monitoring domestic communications on several occasions. After 9/11, the Patriot Act authorised the NSA to bypass the FISA court and engage in warrantless wiretapping, and some of its provisions are believed to have paved the way for the Prism programme.
The agency is spending over $2 billion (£1.3 billion) building a massive data centre in Utah. The massive facility is believed to be where the NSA stores the huge amounts of data that it collects every day.
What is FISA?
The FISA court is a secret court tasked with overseeing the NSA's activities. It was founded in 1978, with the passing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was born from criticisms in Congress then that the NSA was beginning to overreach itself.
The court reviews the NSA's surveillance activities, but it has been pointed out that in its 40-year history it has virtually never declined a request for a surveillance warrant.
**I notice that you've only been referred to US citizens.
What about the rest of us?**
Good spot. The Obama administration has tried to re-assure Americans that their constitutional rights are not being trampled.
But people in the rest of the world, obviously, have no US constitutional rights. With the majority of popular web services being American, and many key pieces of internet infrastructure based in the US, there is little reason to believe that the private data of non-US citizens can't be accessed by the NSA.
So time to quit the internet?
Pretty much, unless you subscribe to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" school of thought.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
