PRISM summarized: Why you should be bothered

For the past months or so, you have probably scanned through a couple of words such as NSA, PRISM, surveillance and the likes. Not a lot of tech savvy people would be interested in politics, especially if all the major plot elements are found in the far west. However, as overly political and seemingly irrelevant as it looks, it’s still worth talking about.

government

What is PRISM? To keep it simple, it is a top secret program done by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) which aims to collect data from, mostly, everyone. At first, it was best to say that only internet giants were included in the program, but it turns out there were more. Here are the few major companies involved:

  • Microsoft
  • Yahoo!
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Apple
  • AOL

PRISM SLIDES

Of course, even with the leaked data, the companies denied their involvement with PRISM (whether you would believe that or not is up to you). Other companies such as Verizon has been reported to be providing the US government with data soon after the leak. Based on the leaked slides, the government has access to data from any of these companies. Examples of data that they can collect are listed below:

  • E-mails
  • Chats (video & voice)
  • Videos
  • Photos
  • File Transfers
  • Special Requests

Remember, we weren’t supposed to know about this; we aren’t supposed to be aware that a group of people can actually access our data just with a snap of a finger. So, who leaked all of this?

edward snowden

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

Edward Snowden

Apart from the U.S. government having this amount of power and surveillance over its people, there are also reports that UK can access the same data through PRISM as well. After some time, further details show up that the German government also used the surveillance program too.

“Because there’s a reason why these programs are classified…”

U.S. President Obama states that there are reasons for hiding these kinds of things from the public, and that this leak isn’t something they’re happy about at all. But even with all the fuss about it, a secret court just renewed the order so that the government can continue spying on people; they say it’s in public interest.

Their reason for watching over your data? Terrorism; they say that a lot of terrorist plots have been already foiled by the government (again, whether you’re buying that or not is up to you).

So what’s the problem with all of this? The U.S. government wants whistleblower Edward Snowden captured for going against their stands, there isn’t that much transparency going on, despite the rage of some people about this, they will continue to spy on us people and the list goes on.

CIA SPYING

Even if I’m no American citizen or such, I’m still bothered by the fact that most of us use American and European services, and that they have power over our personal data. However, what bothers me above everything else is the fact that very few people are bothered by it. Have we stopped caring? Is everyone becoming politically ignorant?

Technology is here to stay, no doubt. It will keep developing as time goes on, but when the time comes where we totally have no privacy – the question is ‘what are we going to do about it?‘.

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No longer secure with Blackberry

Photo from The Guardian online

Photo from The Guardian online

Sometime ago, I attended a training conducted by a German police officer on media security. He advised using Blackberry cellphone because messages are secured and cannot be intercepted.

I don’t harbor any illusion about security officials bothering listening to my phone calls or snooping on my messages. But I don’t like the idea of government agents intruding into private activities of people. That’s one of the reasons I chose Blackberry.

But one of the exposes of American IT expert Edward Snowden, formerly with the Central Intelligence Agency who is now in Hong Kong uncertain of his future, revealed that Blackberry is not at all that secure.

Among the documents shared by Snowden with media showed that leaders and other delegates to the G20 summit in London in 2009 “had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts,” according to the Guardian.

The Guardian also said, “Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.”

G20 is composed of 20 finance ministers and Central Bank governors from 20 major economies: 19 countries plus the European Union.

Included in the G20 are countries that belong to G8 a forum for the governments of eight of the world’s eleven largest national economies. The eight are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Large economies that are excluded are Brazil, India, and China. On Monday, there will be a G8 summit in London.

The Guardian report on the breaking by UK’s intelligence of the Blackberry cellphone security: A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Men with Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.

“Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”

The Snowden document gives doubt now to the one attribute that Blackberry, a Canadian brand, is noted for.

It will be remembered that in 2010, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East thought of banning Blackberry because communications through BB are encrypted and cannot be monitored. Saudi authorities said “this hinders efforts to fight terrorism and criminal activity.”

After discussion with Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission with BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion the ban was reconsidered.

In this day and age of technology, we should be ready to accept that nothing can be kept secret.

As online denizen Tongue-Twisted said, “What Snowden revealed was not entirely new and unknown to everyone. In fact he did not even pass/leak a single top-secret document that proves his claims. It did confirm, though, that what others before him came out with wasn’t pure fiction.

“The first docu I saw on this topic was probably in the mid-90s, where CIA agents being interviewed with their faces miraged and voices synth-scrambled telling how the Defense department employed massive listening stations – humongous computer farms spread throughout the country that scanned phone calls, emails, letters, journals and everything printed and broadcast, and now maybe – texted. Looking out for keywords that earlier have been red-flagged by the security agencies. I think they called it Project Phoenix then.

“Then came the Bush era when Americans willfully surrendered their freedoms to government in exchange for security through the Patriot Act. The activists went as far blaming Bush and his cohorts as the real culprits on 9/11 because they say gov’t needed the people to agree to give up their rights for their own good.

“It demolished, however, America’s image as the paragon of freedom and beacon of democracy – everything we’ve been taught about human rights and of a government that feared its own people was a nothing but a whole bunch of bovine excrement.

“Just like Bradley Manning, Jules Assange and the rest of the whistleblowers against gov’t, Edward Snowden will suffer the same fate as we are already too familiar with.”

More reason to be careful about FB posting

FacebookLast Friday, Facebook confirmed that it has released data related to national security requested by law enforcement agencies.

A statement by Ted Ullyot, Facebook General Counsel revealed that “For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.”

“With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. “

Facebook said,”Requests from law enforcement entities investigating national security-related cases are by their nature classified and highly sensitive, and the law traditionally has placed significant constraints on the ability of companies like Facebook to even confirm or acknowledge receipt of these requests – let alone provide details of our responses.”

They assured that they don’t release data indiscriminately. “We’ve reiterated in recent days that we scrutinize every government data request that we receive – whether from state, local, federal, or foreign governments. We’ve also made clear that we aggressively protect our users’ data when confronted with such requests: we frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested. And we respond only as required by law,” the statement said.

For Facebook users, it’s a good reason to be discriminating with one’s posts.

The concern over FB’s release of information about their members comes after the Snowden expose.

Edward SnowdenEarly this month, American Edward Joseph Snowden, 29 years old, shared with the UK-based Guardian and The Washington Post, classified material on top-secret National Security Agency programs including the PRISM surveillance program and orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Snowden had access to those materials as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii under Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm.

Before that he was “systems engineer, systems administrator, senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications informations system officer.”

PRISM, according to reports that were not denied by the US government, provides the NSA and FBI with the ability to siphon data directly from the servers of major Internet companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Snowden is currently in Hongkong and is resisting extradition requested by US authorities.

Snowden said his intention in exposing PRISM was not to destroy the US.”If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon,” he said in the interview with The Guardian.

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded..The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to … My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he said.

Snowden fears that “Some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.’ And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”