Ever since The Patriot Act came into being, the body of liberties citizens cherish have been chipped away by a bloated security state keen to find nourishment. When rights and liberties are deferred to the voyeurs, the monitors, and the paranoid, a bill of rights starts looking like a bill of words, easily sidestepped and disregarded.
A series of outlets have been chasing up the story that the NSA has been keeping track of every single US Verizon customer’s phone activity since the Boston bombing. Complicity with tech companies in this enterprise is also rampant – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple – have been recipients of tapping efforts by the NSA and FBI, something they have been doing since 2007.
More specifically, The Guardian has managed to secure access to records of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the specifics of Verizon’s networks and government access. In the document, the NSA compels Verizon to hand over “an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” The document further states that disclosure of that fact – that the FBI and NSA sought or obtained such “tangible” things under the order – is prohibited except to appropriate authorities. Gagging is de rigueur.
The classified program under which such activities are taking place is called PRISM, which involves the security agencies extracting audio and video chats, photographs, documents, e-mails, and connection logs (The Washington Post, Jun 7). What is troubling about the program is that it was the devil spawn of something equally insidious – the warrantless surveillance of the Bush administration. Given that such behaviour earned the judicial ire of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the new presidency sought other sources to legitimise mass surveillance programs.
As is typical with the Obama administration, the law is something to twist and turn, a matter of rhetorical play rather than substantive realities. Legality is the spice of the new surveillance state. The Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 were olive branches to the new presidency, affirming that data mining was well on its way to becoming standard practice.
The document which wound its way to The Washington Post reveals the existence of what many have feared – that the government is merrily going about its business of keeping tabs on you in virtually every conceivable way. The document itself features “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, PayTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” The Guardian has similarly obtained access to the 41 PowerPoint slides of the leaked NSA document detailing the PRISM program in all its inglorious intrusiveness.
