09 Sep 13 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, United States
(Photo: David von Blohn / Demotix)
It seems you can’t step away from the computer for more than a few hours these days without a story revealing previously secret information about the National Security Agency (NSA) setting the internet aflame. The scandal has sparked an investigative journalism renaissance with virtually every major news organisation in the country—not just the keepers of the Snowden files—getting in on the act.
Several stories of critical significance broke in the last two weeks. First, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA’s surveillance system, “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans.” The Journal detailed the NSA’s direct access to telecommunications’ fiber optic cables around the country and their extraordinary reach into many corners of the web.
The next day, the administration finally released the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unconstitutional, making front-page news around the country. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization for which I work, has been suing the Justice Department for its release for over a year. The ruling showed the NSA had vacuumed up more than a 150,000 Americans’ emails, only alerting the court to a collection method that had been in place for three years. The court also accused the NSA of “material misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program” on two other occasions.
Until two weeks ago, the administration had stuck to the talking point that all the privacy violations were unintentional. That was already cold comfort to Americans, as the Washington Post had previously reported, based on Snowden documents, that the NSA has been committing thousands of privacy violations, however unintentional, affecting untold number of people per year. And the numbers seem to be increasing.
Soon after the FISA court opinion was released, Bloomberg News revealed that a still-classified NSA inspector general’s report documented “approximately a dozen” willful privacy over the last decade by the NSA. This contradicted many previous statements by government officials, including NSA chief Keith Alexander, who said “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy” at a speech on August 8.
The Wall Street Journal followed up, detailing how many of these violations consisted of analysts following former spouses or partners (nicknamed “LOVEINT”). The Journal explained that most of the violations were self-reported. How many went unreported we will likely never know.
Couple this with the fact that NBC News reported how Edward Snowden was able to browse the NSA networks for months without detection, and you have an agency which claims it has strict internal oversight procedures in place, but seems to have only one real mechanism for enforcement: self policing.
Amazingly, all of these stories have come since President Obama was forced to address the issue at a press conference just three and a half weeks ago in response to the first wave of stories published by the Guardian and Washington Post. At that point, the sea change in public opinion about civil liberties and privacy had become clear and Congressmen in both parties had been pressuring the White House for weeks. Obama promised more transparency to programs (it’s important to remember he also promised more transparency six years ago when he was first running for president), but there were no concrete proposals for reining in the out-of-control powers of the NSA. He did not even mention the two major stories of the day, one in the Guardian, and the other in the New York Times. Obama did say this, however:
What I’m going to be pushing the [intelligence community] to do is rather than have a trunk come out here and leg come out there and a tail come out there, let’s just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they’re looking at. Let’s examine what is working, what’s not, are there additional protections that can be put in place, and let’s move forward.”
While the full elephant is the only thing that will satisfy the public at this point, disturbingly, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, the lone NSA critics on the Senate intelligence committee, cryptically said in a press release after Obama’s press conference that we’ve only learned “just the tip of a larger iceberg.”
Congress is currently on August recess, an annual break where members return to their home districts to hear from their constituents. We can expect some sort of action when they return. Eighteen bills have already been introduced, with many more on their way, and as Politico reported, members from both parties are listening to people at town halls voice their concerns about NSA surveillance, “a sign that fears about the ultra-secret National Security Agency have spread beyond the Beltway as lawmakers embark on their annual town-hall tours.”
Meanwhile, the reporting will only continue, as the Guardian is now sharing some of the Snowden documents with the New York Times and ProPublica after GCHQ disturbingly entered the Guardian offices in London and oversaw the destruction of a copy of the Snowden files.
Early on, the administration and its defenders may have hoped the story would disappear with the next news cycle. It won’t. The NSA scandal is destined to a prime issue in the fall Congressional session, carrying into next year’s midterm elections. The administration’s attempts to calm the public with transparency-after-the-fact PR measures won’t change the narrative.
What we want to see is this headline: “Obama reins in NSA surveillance authority.”
This article was originally published on 9 Sept, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
15 Aug 13 | Bulgaria, Digital Freedom, News and features
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
While the revelations around mass surveillance by the US and some European governments were reported by Bulgaria’s media, the country’s focus in recent months has been the fallout from the country’s elections.
After a polarising election in May, tens of thousands went out to protest against the new Bulgarian government and staged daily rallies for over nearly two months. As a result, the significance of the NSA revelations was not enough to elevate it above domestic political skirmishes.
The Snowden affair had all the ingredients for the media sensation other European countries experienced: a huge cover-up affirming most citizens’ suspicions about governments spying on them, a global chase through Hong Kong and Moscow (with possible sequels in Vienna, Havana and Caracas) and – most importantly – a local context.
Bulgarians, long sensitive about government surveillance after nearly five decades of totalitarianism, had an eavesdropping scandal of their own as recently as in April when a former interior minister was accused of wiretapping a host of political figures, businessmen and journalists. According to one opinion poll conducted in April, 73% of Bulgarians believed that their government had been practicing illegal wiretapping.
Thus, the interest for the Snowden affair among the Bulgarian public was a given. And the media promptly reacted, assigning it the expected prominence among their foreign affairs coverage, if not the front pages which the scandal got in Germany, the UK or France.
“Revelations about the NSA activities were covered in Bulgaria, but did not become a central topic for the media as they of coincided with the anti-government protests,” said Nelly Ognyanova, a leading Bulgarian media law expert and media analyst. ‘However, Bulgarian media paid special attention to the aspect of the EU – US relations in the light of the scandal,” she said.
Media in Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007, covered the reaction in Brussels and in major European capitals and especially in Berlin where the topic was becoming a battleground in light of the German general elections in the fall. Bulgarian media also focused on the fact that the NSA scandal was threatening to derail the negotiations for a major free trade agreement between the EU and the US.
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Since there are only a handful of Bulgarian foreign correspondents, local media mostly quoted international titles like The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. The Snowden revelations also did not have (obvious) Bulgarian links – when information emerged that the US was secretly wiretapping foreign embassies on American soil, the weekly “Capital” tried to contact the Bulgarian mission in Washington but was referred to the foreign ministry in Sofia which, in turn, had no comment on the case.
As for Snowden himself, Bulgarian media painted a mostly neutral portrait of the whistleblower.
“Bulgarian media were rather sticking to the facts without taking a judgmental position on Snowden, but without making him look like a hero as well,” said Ognyanova. “In Bulgaria there was no discussion like the one that took place in other countries about whether Snowden is a hero. Against the backdrop of the very important information that he revealed, however, the media treated him with a degree of sympathy for his civil courage.”
Given the anti-government protests and the heightened domestic political situation, the political and social media reaction to the Snowden affair appeared mostly muted. The Bulgarian social networks – an otherwise vibrant community of some 2.5 million people – was mostly preoccupied with the anti-government protests which, in fact, originated mostly on Facebook walls and Twitter profiles and later transferred to the streets of Sofia and other major cities.
One small political party, the Greens, issued a statement in July calling the revelations “a serious attack on civil rights and the foundations of democracy” and asking the Bulgarian government to offer asylum to Snowden.
“The Greens party expresses our gratitude to Edward Snowden for his courage and for his service to EU citizens,” the statement said.
According to Ognyanova, the media law expert, it is important to draw conclusions from the NSA affair.
“Either in the free trade pact or in another agreement, there must be a provision to protect the personal data and privacy of European citizens,” she said. “It is high time for the EU to have their own clouds and to not provide our information to companies under the jurisdiction of countries outside the European Union,” she said. “I expect this from my government and from the EU, being its citizen.”
This article was originally published on 15 Aug, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org. Index on Censorship: The voice of free expression.
08 Aug 13 | Czech Republic, Digital Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society
When the Guardian published the news about the Prism case, it soon became clear that the Czech Republic was also one of the countries monitored by the NSA. In a country in the midst of political turmoil, the news of mass surveillance generated little interest from the media or the public.
“Friends should not be spied on,” commented Angela Merkel on the discovery that US intelligence spied on European citizens and authorities by exploiting their private data gained from internet companies, including Google. But no such clear comments have been made by the majority of Czech politicians.
Both the Czech president Miloš Zeman and prime minister Jiří Rusnok have remained quiet about the revelations. Only one member of the largest party in parliament, the Social Democrats, criticised both the surveillance itself and the fact that Edward Snowden broke his confidentiality agreement with the NSA. “It is an unprecedented insult to the mutual trust with the EU,” wrote the Social Democrat Libor Rouček, who is vice president of the European Parliament, on his official blog. “The USA should put maximum effort both into arresting Snowden as well as explaining why they spied on their European allies,” Rouček wrote. The second largest party, the Civic Democratic Party, has made no official statement on the issue.
The Communist Party (currently holding 11% seats in parliament) did not comment either, but their sister organisation, the Communist Youth Union, has published numerous articles on their website, calling the spying “a brutal attack on freedom“, and praising Snowden as a hero. The party that has offered Snowden the most support is the non-parliamentary Czech Pirate Party (holding 2. 2% support in the opinion polls). The Pirates asked the interior minister to grant Snowden asylum, but they did not receive an answer before the government’s summer recess, which began in early July.
Surveillance: no longer big news?
Just a few hours after the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the news on Prism in June 2013, the Czech media reported on it . But most of the coverage has been neutral and very few comment pieces have been published regarding the issue. In the commentaries that have been published, Snowden has been portrayed as an ambivalent character. He has been criticised for breaking his contract with his employer, but also praised for his courage to speak out about what has been suspected for a long time. Most commentators have stressed that the idea that information has been obtained through spying on big companies such as Google is not a new thing.
“It has been known for a long time that the NSA has been building big IT centres with super fast computers,” writes Jiri Sobota, a leading commentator for the weekly Respekt. “On the other hand, we are all involved in the same thing on a daily basis,” freely allowing Google to do basically the same thing: analyse our data “in order to ‘understand’ us better”.
It is hard to sum up the public reaction as there has been no Czech opinion poll on the Prism case, but a brief look at social media shows interest is on the wane. The revelations have been discussed more on social media than in regular media outlets. On Facebook, which is used by every third Czech, it was a heavily debated topic in the first half of June, but then the interest soon declined. Twitter, used by about one Czech in a 100, has seen more consistent coverage of the news. There have been about 3,500 tweets on Snowden since the Prism case started. For comparison, the hottest current issue discussed in the country – the love affair of the former prime minister Petr Necas with the head of the government´s office Jana Nagyova, who spied on Necas’s wife with the help of the state security and helped scuttle the Necas government — was tweeted about 4, 000 times in the same time period.
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EU leaders: Stop mass surveillance | Лидеры Евросоюза: прекратите массовую слежку! | Líderes europeos: Paren la vigilancia masiva | Dirigeants européens: Arrêtez la surveillance de masse! | Europas Staats-und Regierungschefs: Stoppen Sie die Massenüberwachung! | Liderzy Unii Europejskiej: zaprzestańcie masowej inwigilacji! | Лидери на ЕС: Cпрете масовото наблюдение |
Worry-free Czechs
In general, the Snowden case has created little interest in the Czech Republic. That may be surprising due to the 2012 Eurobarometer survey. While, according to the survey, 25 % of Europeans said they were worried about spying on the internet, the number was much higher among Czechs: 37%. However, though they may be worried, Czechs do not have a very strong tradition of public protest and they have never protested against mass surveillance.
When Germans protested heavily against the Google Street View recording in 2011, Czechs remained without one critical word towards the very same activity in their country. The public also remain relatively mute to the government’s draft legislation that would enable the state institutions to monitor the cell phones of every citizen in the country.
One of the explanations of the lack of interests in the Prism case is also the fact that it came in the middle of the biggest political turmoil the country has witnessed since the fall of the Iron Curtain, so the focus has generally been more on domestic politics. Also, Czechs — unlike Germans, British or other nationalities — have not yet witnessed a major scandal related to mass surveillance yet, so the public fear of such activities might be lower.
Historically, the general perception of the US has been very positive in the Czech Republic, which is why some commentators are saying that had another country been caught spying the reaction would have been stronger.
29 Jul 13 | Comment, Digital Freedom, News and features, United Kingdom, United States
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
In the 1970s, mass surveillance was seen as especially a Cold War thing – what the Soviet bloc did to its own citizens, while also spying on the West. The West ‘only’ targeted a few Soviet spies and perhaps some left-wingers too — but mainly focusing on the Soviet Union and its satellites. From phone taps to opening letters, to directly observing someone, mass population surveillance was certainly undertaken by the Stasi and others, with their armies of informers. But mass snooping was not seen as a domestic concern or risk at home in the West.
Today and every day, we leave our digital footprints all over the place. Our digital trail is collected by telcos, web hosts, social media and others. And as the Snowden/NSA revelations have shown, our data is especially hoovered up from all these sources and more by the US, UK and other governments – covering millions of people around the world.
Prism, Tempora and other programmes indicate a major intelligence dragnet that surely constitutes mass surveillance, with little legal justification, and one that invades and undermines our right to privacy and our freedom of speech – since if everything we write, say and do is recorded and collected then how we behave as individuals and social animals surely changes.
Not so say some. Mass data retention isn’t snooping and surveillance until you analyse it and use it – and then there are various laws that allow targeting of suspicious individuals or groups. After all, if companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo accumulate masses of our data, and analyse it for advertising purposes, then why should we worry that governments hoover up our data too?
This is a slippery argument and worth unpacking. If a government and its intelligence services want to spy on their own or another population, there is very little transparency and accountability as to how they do that, or what the legal justification, if any, is – and as the underwater cable taps by GCHQ indicate, often with very little need to approach the web hosts or anyone else to ask permission to intercept data.
Mass surveillance needs various elements to work for those carrying it out. You need to collect the data, analyse it according to your interests and needs, and then act on it in some way. For sure the Stasi, like authoritarian regimes and actors today, also understood well that even the act of collection could be, and was intended to be, chilling and fear-inducing.
But what of the US or British or French governments today? Is their collecting of data on all of us – around the world not just their own populations – just big data, to be used for targeted analysis? Or is it an inevitably chilling act, on the basis of which fishing expeditions are carried out, groups and individuals are identified on a large scale as potentially suspicious through the data analysis, and further monitoring and arrests, through to extraordinary rendition or drone attacks, may be the follow up.
The huge quantities of data collected on us in one programme – such as Tempora – can be analysed to build a multi-dimensional picture of our individual personal lives. And with little or no transparency as to who can access the data, or how the analysts are themselves monitored and regulated.
Mass data collection on all our digital communications challenges our rights to freedom of speech and privacy, and more broadly puts at risk our democracy – how can governments be held accountable, if journalists’ sources are no longer anonymous or campaign groups are fully monitored?
The huge overreach by the US and UK governments in deliberately collecting up our data around the world has set up the framework and data for mass surveillance. It’s a core part of monitoring us all. If we are to stop it, then we have to stop the reckless hoovering up of our data (to an extent that puts companies in the shade) and return to a more proportionate and targeted approach.
Mass data retention is a central element in mass surveillance. It needs to stop.
