The Issue Of Government Surveillance In Globalisation Age (In The Context Of Snowden's Case)

Introduction

In these past decades, also known as the ‘Information Age’, data privacy and security have been prime concerns, especially after the Snowden incident and Cambridge Analytica. This has brought up several questions, primarily that of privacy protection, as well as controlling the usage and distribution of our personal information. This wasn’t always the case. So, the question that arises here is what did the Snowden leak and how is that related to globalization?

Pre 2013 Era

The United States government, with the help of other four aids, had created and formally established a surveillance program called ‘ECHELON’ in 1971. The program was used to spy on Russian military and diplomatic communication between its allies by intercepting the Russian satellites. But even as the Cold war ended in 1991, the program was still used and had expanded to intercept more sensitive information of countries such as India, Brazil etc by intercepting their satellites as well. But all that changed after 9/11 as Edward Snowden quoted- “The post 9/11 saw the change from Exceptional surveillance to Global surveillance.”

As a response to the attack, the Bush Administration had declared a ‘war on terror’. As part of the plan, the administration had also secretly started a surveillance program called Terror surveillance or better known as President’s surveillance program with the National security agency (NSA). This program allowed to monitor calls and communications patterns of those who are deemed a national security threat and if any of them showed any usual behaviour without having to obtain a warrant from the FISC. Calls that were monitored were only international calls and not the ones which exterminated within the US borders.

But that was far from the truth as an article published by USA Today in 2006 revealed that the NSA had been collecting millions of bytes of data of common law-abiding citizens. Information including calls, messages and internet activity metadata. without a FISA warrant and that three major companies, Verizon, Bellsouth and AT&T were involved, who collected the information and sent it to the NSA. This was leaked by a man who had worked with Verizon for 22 years as an engineer. His name was Mark Klein. Even though the American public had for the first learned about the term Mass Surveillance, the case was mostly forgotten as time went by.

2013

In 2013, an American whistle-blower and a CIA subcontractor and employee named Edward Snowden had leaked highly classified documents of the NSA to the journalists working in The Guardian and The Washington Post. These documents revealed how the NSA and multiple governmental agencies, with ties to the NSA, around the world were secretly monitoring their citizens and foreign citizens to “protect citizens” and to “defeat terrorism”. One example being of the UK’s GCHQ, which collected information and then hand it over to the agency. Further revelations by the New York Times and Der Spiegel showed that multinational tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple shared private information by allowing access to their cloud servers. And that even now, communication companies such as Verizon still shared information with the agency.

How did this work out?

This was achieved by multiple methods. The first method being by tapping into fibre optics cable around the world. The internet and the flow of access between countries and people depend on the undersea laid fibre optic cables. The second method was to make a deal with the tech-giant companies to allow the agency to access the servers.

The agency collected metadata and the content of those emails, calls and text messages. The content that was collected every day was deleted after 3 days until and unless it wasn’t from the targeted person. But the metadata was kept longer. Metadata does not contain the content but provides the rest of the crucial information, such as to whom was the communication established with, where was the location of it and when did it happen. This helped in making profiles about the people, from where they lived to who all they know. A profile containing their personal information.

The third method of collecting information was to hack into the device itself, such as your phone or laptop.

The fourth method was under the program name of Xkeyscore. The agency collected data of nearly everything the user did online and stored in the NSA database. It would then allow access to this database to officials who could search up whatever they wish for. This program had access to over than 700 servers around the world.

There were many more programs under the agency such as Boundless informant, TEMPORA and much more. Which leads to the fact that every citizen, regardless of their nationality, was being watched and heard.

Post 2013 Era

The question that now arises is how is all of this connected to rapid Globalization of the world? One of the definitions of globalization is the interconnectivity of the world through advancements in science and technology.

Tech-giants such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google are the forerunners in the world of technological advancements. And these companies were also at the centre of the documents that were leaked. These companies allowed the agency to gain access to their private cloud servers. This not only helped to gather information on their own citizens but also on foreign citizens since most of the data travelling through the servers present in the US. This came under the program named as PRISM. Via the access, the agencies collected data on users from what they liked to what their personal preferences were. Based on this, as mentioned before, a profile containing their personal information was made on each person. Although, not all companies were keen on this. Yahoo unwillingly had to share information since they lost against the NSA after filing a case in the FISA court. But we didn’t know about this because the FISA court is a secret court with secret hearings and it mostly grants the requests made by the agency.

As mentioned before, with rapid globalization, the devices that are used to connect people around the world to each other could also be hacked in to steal information of the user to keep an eye on them by the CIA or NSA or the FBI. This was done by exploiting the software loopholes existing popular gadgets rather than fixing them. By doing this, they had access to everything that you did to what and where you were. They could even switch on camera and microphone without the user realizing it and then record and capture data. Because of which, even the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg covers his laptop’s camera with tape. An example of the governmental agency hacking into a device would be the San Bernardino shooting. The government was pushing Apple to break and allow access into the shooter’s iPhone for investigation which the company declined but later it was found out that the FBI had already hacked into the phone to gain access to the information without Apple’s help.

Another way is to use smart devices to keep an eye on you that are now commonly used in every household. A recent document leak by Wikileaks released how the CIA was preparing to hack into Smart TV under the program called Weeping Angel. It tricked the user to think that the device has been switched off, but in reality, the device was still on and was now eavesdropping into your conversations.

In the recent years, Amazon has also come under fire as many users have to notice that Alexa, the virtual assistant used famously on Amazon Echo but on other platforms as well, eavesdrops into the conversations and send them to the government though it hasn’t been confirmed yet.

So, what are the implications of this?

The information that has been collected over time about you could be used against you in the court if you were ever wrongfully convicted of a crime or even be detained in a prison because of all that data. It could also be used to change your thoughts and change the perception of what’s wrong or right and that of the world around you as in seen in the case of Cambridge Analytica, a company which managed to swing the 2016 Presidential election in the favour of Donald Trump by gaining access to millions of user data via Facebook by filling out a simple questionnaire.

Conclusion

In two independent commissions launched into the matter by the White House, the results showed that the global surveillance by the agency had not till date been able to stop any terror attacks on the American soil or overseas. But rather, due to the fact it being this wide scale, the information that was deemed necessary was lost among several unnecessary ones. Even though the president in office likes to claim otherwise.

But the question that remains is as the pace of globalization is rapidly advancing day by day, how sure can someone be that their every step is not being watched? That every word we speak is not being recorded? That their data is protected and not being shared by intelligence agencies?