Surveillance
Look who's listening
America's National Security Agency collects more information than most people thought. Will scrutiny spur change?
Jun 15th 2013 | LONDON AND WASHINGTON, DC |From the print edition
THICK and fast they came at last, and more and more and more. On June 5th the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that America's National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans not suspected of crimes. A day later, theWashington Post reported the existence of a programme code-named PRISM, under which the NSA collects an unknown quantity of e-mails, internet phone-calls, photos, videos, file transfers and social-networking data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Skype, Microsoft and PalTalk—a video-chat service popular in the Middle East and among Muslims.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that widespread collection of telephone records had been going on for years. As for PRISM, on June 8th America's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, issued a rare public statement acknowledging its existence, but stressing that it is lawful and operates under a secret court that oversees intelligence-gathering. The leaker revealed himself the next day: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had worked as a security contractor at the NSA for the past four years, employed by several private contractors.
- Look who's listening
In an interview with the Guardian (from Hong Kong, where he had holed up in hope of avoiding extradition to America), Mr Snowden said the NSA had built the capacity to ingest massive quantities of information from people not suspected of crimes. "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," said Mr Snowden. He believes that the public, not spies and secret courts, ought to decide whether this is right. He chose to reveal himself to avoid hiding behind the secrecy he abhors.
Since its creation in 1952 the NSA has been listening in on the world's communications, from drunk Soviet leaders to Osama bin Laden's satellite phone. Its thirst for information is well known. For decades, under a programme called Echelon, it has operated listening stations around the world that intercept troves of phone and data traffic.
Yet the latest disclosures suggest a scale of data-collection bigger than many experts had expected. A former high-ranking American official with ties to intelligence says more programmes skirting legality have still to be exposed. Mr Snowden has handed over "thousands" of classified documents, according to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the story, so more disclosures are probably on the way. His revelations have already prompted condemnation—and vigorous debate over the proper role and extent of modern government surveillance.
Insight into the telephone-data collection came from a leaked order from a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court instructing Verizon, one of the country's biggest telecoms firms, with 121m American customers, to hand over information about all calls on its network "on an ongoing daily basis". The FISA court was created in 1978 to approve or deny government requests to listen to foreigners' calls on the ground of national security. Other telecoms firms are believed to deliver data under similar FISA orders, which appear to be renewed every three months.
The order does not give the government the right to listen to the content of calls, as Barack Obama, in response to the leak, emphatically told Americans. For that, law-enforcement agents need a separate warrant: one far harder to obtain because it requires suspicion of particular individuals and proof that "normal investigative procedures have been tried and failed". Instead, the NSA has hoovered up "metadata"—the records of who people call, when, for how long, and so on.
Back when telephones were plugged into walls and data analysis was done by humans, the usefulness of metadata was limited: hence the lower evidentiary standards required to obtain them. But thanks to powerful computers that can map people's associations, and mobile phones that pinpoint a person's movements, metadata can now provide a detailed portrait of who people know, where they go and their daily routines. The NSA may be able to use metadata to identify connections between people even if they have never shared a direct link, just as Facebook can predict which people a user may know. From a security point of view, what matters is getting all the information available. At the same time, the need to examine data at a moment's notice has shifted the regime to "collection first" and analysis later, under FISA approval.
The details of PRISM are murkier. The initial leak for the programme was a computer slide presentation, in which the NSA said it had access to a cornucopia of customer information from American web firms. That stoked fears that the NSA is hoovering up information on a grand scale. But according to Mr Clapper, PRISM is not a data-gathering tool; it is an "internal government computer system" for accessing content that a court has already ordered companies to provide.
Stewart Baker, a former homeland-security official, compared PRISM to FTP (file transfer protocol)—a way to transfer files over a network. In America's system of law-enforcement wiretapping, operators must provide access to the line when they are served with a court order to do so. Big internet companies may have simply designed a similar system for requests for content. There is no evidence yet that all the world's Skype conversations, e-mails and Google docs are being sucked into NSA headquarters.
Hands off my metadata
The leaks have shaken the Obama administration, and drew swift criticism in Congress. Two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who have warned about state intrusions into privacy for years, demanded that the government should reveal more about its data-gathering. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican and the author of the Patriot Act, the legal basis for the sweeping surveillance, called the activities "an abuse of that law". A bipartisan group of eight senators has introduced legislation to force the government to make public its interpretation of the laws that seem to condone the surveillance. On June 11th the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an advocacy group, sued the government over the surveillance programmes.
But both the metadata programme and PRISM appear to be legal. Both were approved by a FISA court, even if the breadth of surveillance of American citizens seems at odds with the privacy protections in FISA. Many criticise FISA courts for excessive deference to the government: in 2012 the government made 1,856 applications for electronic surveillance to FISA, and none was denied.
Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution argues that the metadata programme rests on a "very aggressive reading" of section 215 of the Patriot Act. That section allows the FBI or others to apply to a FISA court for a warrant compelling businesses to turn over "any tangible things", as long as they are "relevant to an authorised preliminary or full investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a US person". The authorities seem to believe that obtaining records of every telephone call made in America is either relevant to an investigation or an essential bulwark against international terrorism.
As for PRISM, on paper the protections against privacy abuse seem robust. The government does not "unilaterally obtain information" from company servers, nor does it target anyone for information-gathering without "an appropriate, and documented foreign-intelligence purpose to the acquisition". It does not intentionally target any American citizen. The process is monitored by a FISA court, by Congress (through twice-yearly reports) and by independent inspectors-general. The information is subject to "minimisation procedures" designed to protect Americans unconnected to an investigation whose information is accidentally gathered.
Yet that does not reassure everyone. Just three months ago Mr Wyden asked Mr Clapper, who was testifying under oath before the Senate, whether the NSA collects "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans". Mr Clapper said it did not; thanks to Mr Snowden's leak, everyone now knows that it does. As a candidate, Mr Obama applauded the courage of whistle-blowers (and rode into the White House on their disclosures); as president he has prosecuted them far more vigorously than his predecessors did. Then there is the data centre that the NSA is building near Salt Lake City, Utah. It is likely to cost at least $1.2 billion, and some expect its computers to provide five trillion gigabytes of storage. The agency did not build it to stand empty.
Still, the American public may not mind too much. A poll taken in the days after the metadata programme was exposed found that a majority of respondents (56%) believe that monitoring their phone calls is an "acceptable" way to investigate terrorism—though a substantial minority (41%) disagreed. (On the question of e-mail monitoring, the split went the other way: 52% said it was unacceptable while 45% approved.)
Separate from the question of trust is the subtler issue of data-mining's efficacy. Bruce Schneier, a security expert, does not believe that a data-mining dragnet works. Terrorism, he says, "is a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and dumping more hay on the stack isn't going to solve [it]." He advocates "going from person to person with targeted warrants".
The government claims that information gathered has disrupted plots and stopped potential attacks, though the details remain classified. On June 12th the head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, said the surveillance programmes had helped prevent "dozens of terrorist events"—though they did not avert the Boston bombings.
Whatever the truth, the leaks are damaging America's telecoms and internet firms, especially the companies whose cheerful logos appear at the top of the leaked slides describing PRISM. The bosses of Google and Facebook, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, both strongly denied that the NSA has special access, and said they had not received orders to supply communications data, like the one issued to Verizon. Yet it is possible to speculate that they are simply unaware of some data-hoovering. According to a lawyer at a telecoms company and the retired boss of a large telecoms group operating in the United States, telecoms companies have long been required to employ technicians with security clearances who assist in government surveillance, but are not allowed to disclose their activities to their uncleared bosses. The same request may, perhaps, have been extended to web firms.
Google, Facebook and Microsoft have requested permission to publish the numbers of national-security requests they receive, including FISA orders. So far there is no sign that the big web firms are losing users, and their share prices have not been hit. But the boss of a large European telecoms operator says he plans to market his services on the basis that they protect customer data from America's prying eyes.
American officials keep repeating that they hoover up very little content belonging to their own citizens. That is no comfort to the many millions of foreigners who visit American websites or whose traffic happens to pass along networks owned by American firms. On June 10th William Hague, Britain's foreign minister, promised that his country's spies would explain to a parliamentary committee how they may have benefited from America's surveillance. British MPs fear that spooks are asking American agencies to fish out information on Britons they are forbidden to collect themselves—a claim Mr Hague said was "fanciful".
Snoopers international
China dined out on the surveillance saga, with the state-run China Daily remarking that it was "certain to stain Washington's overseas image", and citing a Chinese academic who condemned "the unbridled power of the [American] government". Peter Schaar, Germany's data-protection chief, said the alleged scale of the spying was "monstrous". Europe's politicians have long fretted about FISA. In October a report prepared for the European Parliament warned that the law had granted American spies "heavy-calibre mass-surveillance firepower" and recommended that cloud-storage providers should be required to warn European users of the risks.
The weaker powers granted to European spooks are part of a pattern. In April the British government was forced to drop plans to make it easier for investigators to see whom troublemakers contact online. It aimed to require more phone and internet firms to store data about what their customers do, but would probably not have allowed authorities to download and store it daily, as in America. Critics mauled the proposal, but appreciated that it had been made public and debated. European privacy groups blame American lobbying after the September 11th attacks for the EU's own limited data-retention law. Germany, Belgium and the Czech Republic have failed to ratify it fully; Austria and Ireland have asked a European court to rule on it.
But America's energetic snooping is part of a broader global trend. Each year authorities in South Korea make more than 37m requests to see communications data stored about the country's 50m people (police in Britain make about 500,000). New laws in Kenya let the government snoop on suspects indefinitely once an application is approved. India is considering a plan to route communications through government equipment, helping it to eavesdrop without alerting service providers. A report presented on June 4th by Frank La Rue, the UN's special rapporteur on free expression, warned that broad interpretations of outdated laws were enabling sophisticated and invasive surveillance measures to flourish around the world. He called for governments to draw up new regulations that properly acknowledge the growing power of modern spying equipment.
Flourishing surveillance abroad may have a surprising impact back home. As more communications are stored on servers far from the citizens who created them, domestic intelligence services are increasingly trying to track activity overseas, says Carly Nyst of Privacy International, a lobby group. South Africa and Pakistan have both passed laws that give agencies more power to intercept communications between foreign citizens and to peruse material on servers abroad. Dutch spies want approval to hack into foreign machines and infect them with spyware. One risk is that security services from friendly countries will collaborate to evade domestic limits on their power, says Mr La Rue. Everyone is a foreigner to someone.
Driving all this is a dramatic expansion in the information people create, transmit and store. The fact that the scale and scope of surveillance has widened too should raise no eyebrows. That does not make the NSA's work legitimate, but it makes it likely to continue—even if better protections emerge against abuse. When asked what the best outcome of the present furore would be, a former intelligence official said: "It's that we have a debate and keep doing what we're doing in better conscience." That is only half the answer.
From the print edition: Briefing
That's ridiculous! One terror attack twelve years ago and we're "at war"? Terror, unlike Japan, is a concept.
Unless you plan on petitioning the Webster and Oxford dictionaries to remove the word, by your standard, we'll ALWAYS be at war.
Instead of focusing on real threats, like heart disease and aging infrastructure, people insist on very abstract threats like terror, and justify sweeping changes to our rights (which are often not restored).
Please learn enough about statistics to understand why you're so gravely wrong.
Google and other Americans companies lied. They made us believe that we could sign in in their system and our privacy would be 100% guaranteed; whether we were watching porn, political sensitive books or even how to build a bomb. They promised that nobody, not even themselves, would really know what we were doing. And based on that trust, based on that guarantee, we would sing-in in their services and use their products.
That was a lie. Now we don´t even know if our emails might ended up in a brief of somebody in Virgina. We don´t even know if twenty years from now, somebody would blackmail us for something we wrote in a private email, or for some porn we watched, or for our internet-behavior.
Yes. I didn´t read the article. To be honest, I don´t trust The Economist points of view anymore. But I feel I need to shout somewhere, to someone. This is outrageous.
"As a candidate, Mr Obama applauded the courage of whistle-blowers (and rode into the White House on their disclosures); as president he has prosecuted them far more vigorously than his predecessors did."
In other words , betrayal.
It isn't the scale of US snooping that is surprising - having a computer trawl gazzilions of call stats in an attempt to figure out who calls which known baddies seems like a reasonable strategy on the face of it. The alarm bells start peeling loudly when we have the likes of William Hague saying "UK and US citizens should be confident their intelligence agencies operate within the law" and then asserting that allegations that GCHQ circumvented the law to gain information on UK citizens were "baseless".
His silence on what "intelligence sharing" laws do and do not allow is deafening.
Obama has just admitted that a British soldier calling home from Afghanistan ( or any other foreigner calling anywhere from anywhere ) has no privacy protection under US laws - the CIA are acting legally in listening in to his calls directly. Given that this "intelligence" was obtained legally in the USA, we'd need a pretty tightly worded law to prevent British spooks from using it under the legal framework of an intelligence sharing agreement. Oversight would be pretty difficult: Don't intelligence sharing agreements allow the divulging party to keep methods secret on the back of assurances of domestic oversight and legality?
It looks awfully like a situation where the USA can help the UK Government abuse it's own citizens rights in practice without breaking any ( UK or US ) laws that are supposed to protect them. Presumably it isn't illegal for MI5 to spy on Americans from GCHQ under British law either ....
I always knew there was a valuable payoff for supporting uncle Sam with a string of compromised politicians and kids in body bags. It hadn't, until now, occurred to me that the main value might be in allowing our own government a legal way to get round it's responsibility to ensure the freedom and privacy that the dead kids thought they were trying to protect.
Maybe I'm paranoid and there are cleverly worded, carefully designed laws complete with bilateral mechanisms for legal oversight that prevent all this sort of thing. Are there any experts out there who know what they are ?
Mr Hague?
Suggestion to every American citizen:
File a freedom of information request with the NSA, demanding to see a printout of all data they have for your mobile phone, as well as any information they have from any of your Internet accounts.
After being confronted with over 300 million such requests, perhaps they will dispose of all the data rather than have to fulfill your requests?
One imagines that the NSA does not like dealing with old fashioned paper.
"As a candidate, Mr Obama applauded the courage of whistle-blowers (and rode into the White House on their disclosures); as president he has prosecuted them far more vigorously than his predecessors did."
Just the tip of the hipocracy iceberg.
It's an expensive police action, not a war. I have friends from Pakistan. FROM Pakistan. I have friends FROM the Middle East. None are "at war" with the US. None are "at war" with the west. Period.
Wanting something doesn't make it real. When casualties, when "double agents" exist in numbers even remotely close to a war start happening, we can give up our rights. When your War-with-a-capital-"W" is a real fight, with an actual possibility of threatening the stability of the west, then we can talk. When casualties happen in numbers approaching that of a real war, we can talk. When you preach nonsense, however
____
neatly formatted
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it may be.
____
I have to disagree. Perhaps your "War" will happen, you internet diehard, you,
____
but not yet.
"Still, the American public may not mind too much."
As long as it is only the spooks who can use it. If the police start using it, I suspect public opinion will change rapidly.
And if the data is made available to the public, well, that's the end of civilisation - it would mean the girlfriends would find out I'm a cheating slut quite quickly... :-(
"Who is listening?"
Clearly, the Senate is not listening. Read the following article which appeared in The Hill.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/305765-senators-skip-classified-brief...
Senators normally arrive in Washington late on Monday. Then that they usually leave to go home on Thursdays.
In addition they usually spend at least 25% of their legislative day, across the street from the Capitol in hotel rooms, where they actively solicit campaign contributions.
Their attempts at lawmaking are often assisted by lobbyists who have been known to write significant portions of various laws in which they were interested.
It's also significant that the press does not go to the extent of naming and shaming senators who are absent when significant briefings are being made.
It is long past the time when significant changes should have been made to the electoral process in order to hold members of both houses of Congress responsible for their actions (or lack thereof).
Actions like imposing term limits on Congress and outlawing paid lobbying would be a good start. However with the power and indifference currently shown by Congress I think the American public has little chance of making changes.
It may well be that the indifference shown by Congress is merely a reflection of the indifference shown by the electorate.
According to a PBS report, the FBI and the CIA had all the tools and manpower available to stop September 11. Moreover, a basic Bayes analysis done by a statistician shows that the probability of finding a terrorist through hacked phone calls is minimal if not virtually impossible.
Interesting piece.
So everything we write here is probably being stored on servers in the US, UK, Russia, China, Australia, Iceland, etc etc waiting to be analysed by hordes of pale faced vitamin D deficient college drop outs earning heaps watching me who doesn't earn heaps but I could if all the taxes I paid were returned to me instead of paying for the equipment and drop outs to watch me writing about them watching me.
Excerpt from 'What is the Primary Fundamental RIght?'
"America had flourished in the free atmospheres of the 19th and early 20th centuries but as it got closer to the 21st that state of freedom was replaced by the most efficient police state in history. So efficient that most of the public were unaware of its fly like compound eyes watching everything they did through surveillance instruments such as Carnivore, Echelon, Magic Lantern and later the Patriot Act, the insidious TIPS and the ubiquitous TIA.
Carnivore is an FBI computer program for monitoring US emails. Echelon is a NSA program for checking world wide communications on phones, radio, emails, faxes, satellite etc. Magic Lantern is an FBI computer virus program that can see what you type. The Patriot Act allows for the spying on Americans in America without judicial permission.
TIPS was a government initiative where people like the mailman and cable men and including some residents were to become spies and keep the police informed of what's going on in their neighborhood. Before the outcry and the name change TIA stood for Total Information Awareness, and it still means just that. Everything you do from driving your car from point A to point B to paying your electricity bill can be monitored, recorded and analyzed. These last three initiatives were proposed to watch for terrorist activity so it wasn't unexpected that illegal drugs use would soon be linked to terrorism.
Now Americans have to contend with the NSL's, National Security Letters, where the FBI and probably any government security department can force anyone to reveal private information about someone else under threat of going to jail if they tell anyone what they've done.
Many security forces supposedly use cell phone 'roving bugs' software where they can listen to conversations within 90 feet (30 meters) of the device using the phones own microphone, even if it is switched off. Removing the battery apparently does not stop this invasion as the phone stores considerable power in its circuitry. Also the location of the phone is always known so even if it is disabled any phones nearby can be remotely activated in seconds to start listening if the location triangulation coordinates are similar. Cell phones can also be used as homing beacons for air attacks.
Probably many of those who knew they were being watched thought they liked it and willingly gave up their liberties in exchange for the security of the Police State.
Using newly fashioned propaganda Police America won the war against Free America by using the gullibility, greed and acquiescence of the American media to frighten the minds of the people against a really free America. By the beginning of the 21st century, Free America's only defense, a constitution over 200 years old, lay bloody and moribund on the steps of the Capitol building, overlooked by the silent statue of Armed Freedom. Beneath her Orwell's Socialist nightmare began materializing under the guise of national security.
On seeing the ugly face of fear, Americans dropped their liberty and ran."
http://www.primaryfundamentalright.org/index.php?pageName=pfrWhatIs
I don't necessary believe everything that PBS says or claims. I was merely saying the subject is highly controversial. As for PBS itself, well if this is not reliable journalism in the United States, what is then?
What's rather disappointing about this otherwise interesting Economist article is that it cited the June 5th the "Guardian" report that America's National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans not suspected of crimes; and t cited the "Washington Post" report about the existence of a programme PRISM, but it did not cite the "South China Morning Post" interview report that the US has been hacking Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong computer sites for years.
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IMO and without dwelling on the individual right issus in this comment, the Snowden "saga" is a good thing happening to America. This is a publicity disaster for someone, but a security disaster for no one.
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Spying with whatever means available including modern day's computer hacking between and among major nations is normal and taken for granted. I suppose a nation, any nation's net security boss was not earning his keep if the very disclosure itself such as by Snowden was even "news" to him.
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It is however the one sided, high pitched public deriding the cyber hacking of other nations as vulcanized by the US that's upsetting the rule of the game. And perhaps as a result of that condemnation, even as a trigger because of it, cases like that of Edward Snowden disclosure disclose.
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As illustrated by Hong Kong's South China Morning Post's interview with Mr. Snowden's disclosure that the US government has been cyber hacking China's computer sites for years, the accuser becomes the accused.
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People hitherto furious at the senseless and often groundless multi-prong attack about China's alleged cyber hacking by the US Congress, the US President, and the West media in general (including the Economist) need not sigh with any sense of vindication however, because when one comes right down to it, such disclosures are "much ado about nothing" for those concerned with net security.
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That's because these exposures are newsworthy only to the people not in the know (i.e., we the public). For the targeted "enemy" who is any enemy worth its salt prying the "spy vs. spy" trade, they must have known about such practices against them all along. As such there can be no real major external harm done to the US and no internal benefit to be gained by other nations from Edward Snowden disclosure IMO.
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At a time when the USA is embroiled in economic difficulties worldwide, the Snowden incident tells to the world once again, perhaps in a strange sort of way, that by virtue of its people, the USA is indeed a country of conscience --- the basic ingredient for being a great country, as the US was and will be again no doubt. From Gettysburg to Ellsberg, from Watergate to Snowden, there has been no lack of Jiminy the Cricket to come out, against all personal odds, to serve Pinocchio's conscience in the nick of time.
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That's why people should be bullish for America. (IMO people should be bullish for China too, but that's another story or topic. Portions of this comment also posted with another Economist article earlier.)
I am particularly annoyed by what Keith Alexander (the head of NSA) said about the effectiveness of their surveillance program. -"(it) had helped prevent dozens of terrorist events".
1. He is trying to downplay the seriousness of the issue by directing the public to think of the (favourable) consequences of their actions. But he made a mistake of consequentialism by thinking that the good outcomes can justify their mis-conduct. And what horrifies me is that a lot of Americans accepted their conversations being monitored if terrorism can be notified. By this, they are simply giving up their basic rights for a security trade-off.
2. Please do not forget, the issues raised by Edward Snowden is much more than its consequence. Let's go back to the basic: What grants the state the right to do the monitoring work? And what does security mean to you? Is it barely a guarantee of a secured living environment? Or is it a general public good that need the civilised people to decide on?
All these are the things that need to be discussed. Don't be fooled by whatever promise the state has given you, if the precondition is without public consensus. They can just, at any time,do behind your back.
If Darth Obama can receive a Nobel Peace Prize, shouldn't Edward Snowden receive one, too?
Compared with Obama, who has done nothing to advance world peace, Edward Snowden is doing humankind a great service by exposing the world's biggest hacker and liar – and alerting people and countries all over the world of their vulnerability in the cyberspace.
The U.S. government might think twice before arresting and torturing Edward Snowden if he had a Nobel Peace Prize (assuming that the U.S. government with its vast resources and spy networks will eventually get Snowden through legal or illegal means).
That might be more useful than asking Beijing not to lend Washington a hand in extraditing Snowden.
(By the way, isn't it ironic? Now, all of a sudden, Beijing becomes a beacon of hope for a Western dissident!)
Is that supposed to be a poem or something? You're not doing yourself any favors.
You are right - Snowden is a hero for all of us. I hope that China will protect him and give him asylum.
The Hongkie local government could be frightened and bullied into extraditing. Most believers in personal liberty still hope one of the local governments in some remote county in China whose computers had been compromise will offer asylum to all whistle-blowers like Snowden, Manning, Assange etc. to lessen the burden from the harassed Latino Correa.
And the international thieving is fully calculated to benefit American commercial interests, as THOUSANDS (most of the highest tech) of U.S. companies willingly participate, and in return get classified information for their own commercial benefits.
It was a smart and justified move to block Google from China, as Google is one of the worst offenders.
Microsoft provides details of security holes in its software (which is a lot, judged from the large numbers of corrective updates) to the U.S. govt. ahead of public announcements, so that America can attack other nations' computers taking advantage of these defects.
America routinely shares the classified data with thousands of American companies. And you wonder WHY American companies are so very successful in international competition, even with their horrendously high labor costs!! It is unfair competition through and through.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-06-13/u-dot-s-dot-agencies-said-to...
This could be a huge WTO action in the making, worth at least $100 Trillion in sanctions for the data theft from around the globe, by the biggest thief that screams "stop thief" the loudest.
Objectively, America, the strongest economy in human history, does not need these thieving ways to succeed. America has the most resources and the smartest people. America should stop thieving voluntarily. No commercial gain is worth being seen as an inveterate thief.
Beijing is taking the lead to call for UN action to establish rules of conduct to stop the dastardly acts of thieving. The world should support the effort. America should support the effort.
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The argument that cell phones and the internet inevitably result, because of technical reasons, in the death of privacy is as ridiculously false as saying that the harnessing of nuclear power had to inevitably result in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario.
In fact the advances in atomic energy should have been focused on cracking the secret of safe fusion as an energy source to elevate our industrialization stage beyond fossil fuels.
And things are, very, very slowly, moving away from the wrong direction: the US/Russia combined atomic bomb yield is today one tenth what it was at the 1960s peak -although still equivalent to 130,000 Hiroshimas-, and disarmament talks seek further steep reductions.
Yet it all depends on stopping proliferation at the hands of North Korea, Iran and Pakistan; taking into account the very secretive Chinese, and very particularly maintaining a free open-markets, open-seas, economically interconnected, non-zero sum international game that today is working, but we can´t say it will work forever.
Under today´s rather benign geopolitical conditions no great power would be justified to hold but a few nuclear weapons, if any, yet agreeing to dismantle the thousands there are is proving to be a difficult task. Universal Surveillance will be harder to get rid of, as we are witnessing right now.
Internet and Communications protocols were designed under the watchful eye of the American "security" establishment with the back-door snooping option always very much in mind, but the very opposite can be technically achieved just as easily.
Cell phone towers owners can be legally mandated under stiff prison sentences to constantly erase data on customer´s locations, cell phone ownership be anonymous, IP addresses not be linked to personal individualization nor physical locations, protocols to prevent remote activation of computers, cell phones and tablets put in place, data mining outlawed and data protection agencies set up to enforce draconian monetary and jail time prosecutions, and on and on.
These and other freedom-preserving measures are very much feasible, and something for people and governments who still value democracy, privacy and the exercise of free will to start working on, now that they still can.
The ultimate destruction of individual free will and aggregate societal change are the inevitable consequences over time of the institution and evolution of a Universal Surveillance System.To allow such a terrible future to unfold for whatever great "safety" advantage to be designed or advertised in the coming years is unconscionable and unacceptable, besides misleading.
One can´t trade his or her humanity in exchange for the safety of living like a vegetable in a universal plantation.
But to be asked to accept such a system under the sorry excuse of "fighting" an statistically insignificant danger called "Islamist terrorism" is absurd beyond description and an insult to common sense.
It is up to each person, and particularly information technology experts and politicians everywhere at all levels, to design better, less dangerous information exchange systems and organize and legislate this danger away.
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