International governments, tech companies and privacy advocates were in a furor following the disclosure that the US government is able to access detailed records of individual smartphone and internet activity, via a wide reaching, top-secret surveillance scheme known as Prism.
Revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA), through Prism, is secretly collecting communications records and tracking Internet usage, including e-mails, documents, photos and other material for agents to review, has sparked a heated debate over the right to individual privacy versus America's right to protect itself and its interests from harm.
Prism into personal data
US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged the existence of Prism, but insisted it was only used under court supervision. US technology companies are legally required to share information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
According to Clapper, "The United States government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of US electronic communication service providers. All such information is obtained with FISA court approval and with the knowledge of the provider based upon a written directive from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence."
Since news of Prism's existence broke, President Barack Obama has staunchly defended US government programmes conducting surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet activity. He argues that surveillance activities were conducted with broad safeguards to protect against abuse.
President Obama has spoken of his own "healthy skepticism" about the surveillance programmes when he first came into office. But things have changed since then. Obama now believes that "modest encroachments on privacy" are warranted.
"They make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity," he said, adding tellingly, "The government's Internet monitoring programme does not apply to US citizens or residents."
It is this last statement that should be most concerning to governments and individual Internet users around the world. The United States is unambiguous about its intentions. The US government's Internet monitoring programme applies to non-US citizens; and, in order to protect its own democracy, it is prepared to violate the democratic rights of other nations.
In this light, countries the world over should be assessing the nature of their technological dependence on the US and on US-based companies. Non-US Governments and businesses should also be critically evaluating the nature of their investment in locally-based Internet infrastructure and support for indigenous technology innovation.
US public private partnership
According to a report in the Washington Post, Prism was created after extensive negotiations between US tech companies and US Federal authorities, "who had pressed for easier access to data they were entitled to under previous orders granted by the secret Fisa court."
But the Washington Post report claims that the secret court orders, made under section 702 of Fisa, served as "one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year."
US technology companies has been loud in their denial of complicity with the Prism programme as further details emerge of their co-operation with US spy agencies. Google, Facebook and Apple have all issued strongly-worded statements denying that they knowingly participated in Prism.
However, the New York Times said, some major tech companies, discussed setting up secure online "rooms" where requested information could be sent and accessed by the NSA. Such systems allow them to dispute the idea of direct access.
According to the New York Times report, the companies named in the Prism documents had co-operated to some degree with the US authorities. Twitter was a notable exception to the list and has reportedly declined to co-operate. Amazon, which offers back office services to a huge number of web companies, is also missing.
In Internet technology we trust
Whatever the case, for the hundreds of millions of Internet users the world over who depend on email, social networks, file storage, and other Internet-based services run by US-based companies, Prism serves as a powerful reminder of how much the global Internet remains dependent on trust in the US' ability to police itself, its government and its institutions.
The visionaries and idealists who built the Internet hoped it would be a universal tool of sharing of knowledge. Today, a shadier vision seems to be emerging. Governments, not just in the US, are using the reach and richness of information about our routine online human interactions, for monitoring and tracking in the interest of public safety.
The truth is, we live in a very different world from the one in which the Internet was conceived. Technological advances have played a significant role in shaping both the promise and the perils of our modern reality. The complex, global, interconnected nature of life cannot be ignored. And the subjectivity of arguments about the balance of the right to privacy against the right to public safety and security will never be easily resolved.
In a USA Today piece, John Nockleby, director of the Civil Justice Programme at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, posed the issue well, stating "The overarching issue of our time is to what degree do we want to allow the government to amass this kind of human interconnectivity in order to forestall the possibility of mass terrorist events."
"There are going to be people swept up merely because the computer algorithms say they should be a target," he said. "So much of this rests on a blind faith that the government is comprised of good guys."
Such faith, however, is neither founded in current reality, nor in the lessons of history. But such faith may be all there is to work with as we continue to build the Internet-enabled, knowledge-based societies of the future.
Bevil Wooding is the chief knowledge officer of Congress WBN (www.congresswbn.org), a values-based international non-profit. He is also executive director of BrightPath Foundation, an education-technology non-profit (www.brightpathfoundation.org). Reach him on Twitter @bevilwooding or on facebook.com/bevilwooding or contact via e-mail at technologymatters@brightpathfoundation.org.
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