JOIN USWe were afraid this would happen. We had been warned by books (George Orwell's ‘1984’) and films (Steven Spielberg's ‘Minority Report’) that with the progress being made in communication technology, we would all end up under surveillance. Of course, we assumed that this violation of our privacy would be practised by a neo-totalitarian state.
There we were wrong, because the unprecedented revelations made by Edward Snowden about the Orwellian surveillance of our communications directly implicate the United States, once regarded as the ‘country of freedom.’
Apparently this came to an end after the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001. President Barack Obama himself admitted, “You can't have 100 per cent security and then have 100 per cent privacy.” Welcome to the era of Big Brother.
What has Snowden revealed? The 29-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) computer analyst who most recently worked for the private company Booz Allen Hamilton, subcontracted to the US National Security Agency (NSA), leaked to The Guardian and to a lesser extent The Washington Post the existence of secret US government programmes to scrutinise the communications of millions of citizens.
We now know that by breaching communications privacy, the US government can access users' files, audio files, videos, e-mails or photographs. PRISM has become the NSA's number one source of raw intelligence used for the reports it provides president Obama on a daily basis.
Continuous surveillance
Snowden told The Guardian, "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time. Everyone is being watched and recorded." The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, is the largest and least-known US intelligence agency.
It is so secret that most US citizens do not even know it exists. It has the lion's share of the intelligence services’ budget and it produces over 50 tonnes of classified material a day. The NSA's interception system can covertly intercept any e-mail, internet search or international telephone call. The complete set of communications intercepted and deciphered by the NSA constitutes the US government's chief source of clandestine information. The NSA is in close partnership with the mysterious Echelon system, secretly created after World War II by five English-speaking countries (the ‘Five Eyes’): the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Echelon is an Orwellian global surveillance system reaching around the world, continuously monitoring most telephone calls, internet communications, e-mail and social networking sites. It can intercept up to two million conversations a minute. Its clandestine mission is to spy on governments, political parties, organisations and businesses.
Within the framework of Echelon, US and British intelligence services have established a longstanding secret collaboration.
Washington and London have set up a Big Brother-style plan capable of finding out everything we say and do in our communications. And when president Obama talks of the ‘legitimacy’ of these practices that violate privacy, he is defending the unjustifiable.
Obama is abusing his power and undermining the freedom of all world citizens. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things," Snowden protested when he decided to blow the whistle. Not by chance, Snowden's revelations came just as the court martial was beginning of US soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking secrets to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing web site that released millions of confidential documents, and when the head of the site, cyber-activist Julian Assange, has spent one year in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Snowden, Manning and Assange are champions of freedom of expression, and defenders of healthy democracy and of the interests of all citizens on the planet. Now they are being harassed and persecuted by the US Big Brother.
Why did these three heroes of our time take such risks that could even cost them their lives? Snowden, who has asked a number of countries for political asylum, replied: “If you realise that that's the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn't matter what the outcome is.”