Every Move You Make, We’ll Be Watching You
Adriana Capilla-Garcia: The Signal
L.D. FORREST
THE SIGNAL
Expansion and reach of U.S. government surveillance programs are set to grow in 2014 with citizens and corporations poised to push back.
Mass surveillance of the American populous has grown since the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001. Currently, the National Security Agency (NSA) is at the spearhead of mass data collection. The NSA is equipped to collect telephone and cell phone logs, emails, chat and instant messaging transcripts, text messages and even images and audio files.
In late 2013, the NSA finished creating one of the world’s largest data centers. The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is estimated to have cost $1.5 billion to build and is able to store 1 billion gigabytes of data.
One billion gigabytes is enough storage to hold 100,000 Libraries of Congress – this includes all digital material, audio and video the Library of Congress has on file as well as text literature and information.
The Utah Data Center is used as a mass information gathering facility where the NSA can sweep a broad net through domestic and foreign telecommunications data. The data is gathered and temporarily stored until it is analyzed.
This information is then sent to a secret court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), where it is determined what, if any, actions need to take place in regard to the analysts’ findings.
In 2007, a ruling by the FISA court removed the requirement for a court-ordered warrant before government surveillance agencies could wiretap someone’s phone. This, in part, has lead NSA to the broad-net surveillance structure that it has today.
This method of surveillance has thwarted a number of plots aimed at causing harm to U.S. citizens here and abroad. In July, during an open Capitol Hill hearing, the director of the NSA, Army General Keith Alexander, said that the NSA’s wide-sweeping surveillance had foiled more than 50 terrorist plots worldwide since September 2001, but Alexander could only provide details to the panel for a handful of cases.
The public found out about NSA spying practices after former NSA private contractor Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents to the media in May. Snowden’s actions have been met with both acclaim and criticism. In June, U.S. federal prosecutors charged Snowden with theft of government property and unauthorized communication of national defense information. By then, Snowden had already fled the country, and by August, Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year.
Alternative methods for monitoring people of interest besides mass data collection have not yet been determined by the NSA.
“These were programs that were developed to defend this country,” Alexander said at a public event in Baltimore in early November. “I am not wedded to these programs. If we can come up with a better way of doing them, we should, period.”
Cyber Command is a military cyber security agency that Alexander also heads. Cyber Command works to protect U.S. military networks from cyber attacks and began operations in May 2010.
“There is nothing that anyone from NSA or Cyber Command has done that is wrong,” Alexander said. “From where I sit, we’re doing everything we can to do this right. We hold ourselves accountable.”
The classified documents that were leaked by Snowden have provided the evidence necessary for class-action lawsuits against the NSA. These lawsuits call for the agency to be significantly reined in and for the mass data collection to come to a halt.
The oral arguments for the latest preliminary injunction request began Nov. 18. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon will preside over a hearing between the Department of Justice lawyers and Larry Klayman, leader of the advocacy group Freedom Watch.
Klayman, along with other civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claim that NSA is exceeding its authority under the Patriot Act. The government uses Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify its collection of all American phone records. Section 215 allows orders for phone taps to be placed by only one party and the reasons for why the order was given do not have to be disclosed.
In the wake of details leaking that the U.S. government is also monitoring foreign leaders, even its allies, President Barack Obama made it clear in a call with President Hollande of France Oct. 21 that the United States has begun to review the way that it gathers intelligence, so that it properly balances the legitimate security concerns of its citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share.
The PRISM project, a government codename assigned for another major government
surveillance gathering program, cites Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to justify authorizing “intelligence agencies to monitor the phone, email and other communications of U.S. citizens for up to a week without obtaining a warrant” when one of the parties is outside the U.S.
“The collection under FISA Section 702 is the most significant tool in the NSA collection arsenal for the detection, identification and disruption of terrorist threats to the U.S. and around the world,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA stated in a joint statement released Aug. 21.
What makes this program different from the Utah Data Center is that NSA pulls information from other companies rather than collecting the digital data itself. Under PRISM, NSA gathered information from users through databases of companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Skype, Google, YouTube and Facebook.
“People want privacy, but our government has prioritized security and the economic interests of online companies that lobby against privacy legislation,” said Ashley Packard, professor of communication and digital media studies. “We live in a wired world in which people don’t have adequate protections. They can either operate on that uneven playing field as best they can or not enter the field, period. That isn’t a real choice.”
Some of these companies, particularly Google and Yahoo, were unaware of the extent of information the NSA was pulling from their data centers. In response, Google has rushed to finish encrypting the channels between its overseas data centers, a project that began almost a year ago, effectively shutting out the NSA from its systems and potentially reducing the amount of daily data intake collected by NSA by nearly a third.
Yahoo has announced similar projects, which are slated for completion by the end of the first quarter of 2014.
“As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the U.S. government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo in a press release announcing the security-based projects. “I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever.”
