Byron Clark, Fightback.

The past few years have seen the US led “war on terror” morph from a bloody ground war in Iraq and Afghanistan to something resembling a Hollywood techno-thriller. Three years after soldier Bradley Manning was arrested for leaking an enormous trove of classified documents via Wikileaks, another whistle-blower has revealed that American and British intelligence agencies have been engaged in large scale surveillance programmes.

Edward Snowden was a technical contractor for the American National Security Administration (NSA) before he felt he could not continue the work he was doing in good conscience. After taking leave from his employment and flying for Hawai’i to Hong Kong, he revealed details of the PRISM and Tempora programmes “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” The leaked information was published by The Guardian and the Washington Post.

The NSA programme PRISM began in 2007 with the passing of the Protect America Act, which removed the requirement for a warrant when collecting data on foreign intelligence targets “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States, and made it legal to collect data on American citizens communicating with people outside the US who were under investigation.

The operation collected metadata, meaning data such as the time an email was sent, who it was to and from, as well as the file size of the email, but not the actual contents of the message. This data was collected from a number of different communications technologies facilitated by internet services that are household names, such as Google, Facebook and Skype, although these companies were not knowingly complicit in the programme.

Snowden has described aspects of the data collection as “dangerous” and “criminal” under US law, but has also pointed out that focusing on the illegal surveillance of Americans is “a distraction from the power and danger of this system.” Adding that “Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.”

A similar programme in the UK, Tempora, has been in operating since 2011 and shared information with the NSA. The data collected by Tempora is of a much greater scope than the data collected by PRISM, it includes recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the peoples personal internet use history. Tempora was orchestrated by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who Snowden has described as “worse than the US”. “Tempora is the first ‘I save everything’ approach (‘full take’) in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it”

While PRISM surveillance required the already loose criteria of suspicion, Tempora made no distinction between innocent people or targeted suspects when gathering data. CGHQ lawyers said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because “this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage”.

While any data passing though the UK or US (which most internet communications do) could have been spied on, regardless of what country it originated from, the intelligence agencies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand- via the Government Security Communications Bureau (GCSB) facility at Waihopai near Blenheim – have been sharing information with the NSA. This revelation has fuelled opposition to a bill currently going through parliament that would give more powers to the GCSB.

On June 14, US federal prosecutors filed a sealed complaint, which was made public on June 21, charging Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defence information, and wilful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person; the latter two allegations are under the Espionage Act.

Unable to return to the United States Snowden has been offered asylum by a number of South American nations. When the Obama administration threatened to revoke a trade agreement if the country granted Snowden asylum, Ecuador cancelled the pact themselves. In addition the nation’s Communications Secretary, Fernando Alvarado, announced US$23 million in Ecuadoran aid to the US to provide “human rights training to combat torture, illegal executions and attacks on people’s privacy.”

Snowden is also popular in his home country- with the people if not with the government- a national poll conducted by Quinnipiac University showed a majority (55%) of those polled supported Snowden as a “whistle blower” versus only 34% who saw his as a “traitor”. On July Fourth, the day the USA celebrates independence, protests against the PRISM program and in support of Snowden took place in major US cities around the theme of “Restore the Fourth” a reference to the fourth amendment to the constitution, which provided protection from unreasonable searches and seizure.

At the time of writing, Snowden has not accepted (at least not publically) an offer of asylum, claiming US officials are waging a campaign to prevent him from doing so. When Snowden was suspected to be on board the presidential jet carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales the plane was grounded in Austria when other European countries refused to allow the plane in their airspace.

“The scale of threatening behaviour is without precedent: never before in history have states conspired to force to the ground a sovereign president’s plane to effect a search for a political refugee.”

See also:

• Obama: Surveillance, secrecy and state terror, Ciaran Doolin

Ciaran Doolin, Fightback.

Obama came to power in 2009 after a campaign replete with pledges to return the US to being a nation that respected the civil liberties of its citizens and the human rights of its enemies. Those who assessed Obama’s rhetoric as simply vacuous politicking have since been vindicated. Obama has dramatically expanded the Bush-era surveillance state (discussed in Prism, Tempora and the Case of Edward Snowden), aggressively defended government secrecy and prosecuted the War on Terror with elevated levels of ruthlessness.

Mass surveillance under Bush

The expansion of the state intelligence apparatus in the United States began rapidly after the attack on September 11 in 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act 2001 gave the President of the United States unprecedented power to impinge on the rights of both foreign and US citizens. Among many other draconian measures, the decision to use torture, referred to euphemistically by the Bush administration as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, was justified under the Patriot Act. In 2005 the New York Times published a series of stories detailing extensive surveillance of people within the US by the National Security Agency (NSA) that lacked Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrants. in 2007, under pressure from Congress, the public and the media, Bush returned the programme to the scrutiny of the FISA court, although in August of that year the Protect America Act (PAA) was passed which amended FISA removing warrant requirements for foreign targets “reasonably believed” to be outside the US. These amendments were reaffirmed the following year. The amendment act’s also immunised private organisations from prosecution for cooperating with the US government’s surveillance programs.

Obama escalates surveillance

The amendments to FISA opened the door for a next generation surveillance program – PRISM. The extent of the program was revealed last month by The Guardian who received extensive classified documentation from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The disclosures show that the NSA can unilaterally undertake “extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information” including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. According to The Washington Post, NSA analysts search PRISM data using terms intended to identify suspicious communications by targets whom the analysts are at least 51% sure are not U.S. citizens. Such a low level of surety means that “unintentional” surveillance of US citizens has been extensive. In an interview Snowden summarized the scope of the disclosures, reporting that “in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want.” Alongside PRISM is BLARNEY, a programme which gathers much of the metadata of internet streams for analysis. Metadata includes information about the time, author and IP address of created data.

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