America’s NSA covertly and overtly used other intelligence agencies, global tech firms, and agents to snoop on the entire world.
By Alam Srinivas
One hundred and ninety threecountries (including India), or almost all the nations that exist today! One hundred and twenty two global leaders,including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, presidents of Syria, Malaysia, Peru
and Colombia, and prime minister of Ukraine! Political parties and right-wing organizations such as India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Pakistan People’s Party, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and National Salvation Front. Multilateral agencies such as the United Nations, World Bank, Atomic Energy Agency, European Union, Asian Development Bank, and League of Arab States.
In an Orwellian, almost surrealistic, kind of mindset, world’s “biggest brother”, America’s National Security Agency (NSA), snooped and tapped on all the above individuals, nations and institutions, apart from millions of ordinary citizens across the world.
When Edward Snowden, the agency’s whistleblower, released thousands of documents that revealed the expanse of the surveillance, it shocked the world. Leaders were aghast; the NSA, it seemed, had no respect for
friends and went after the enemies. When the Washington Post wrote about NSA’s bid to keep a tab on the BJP, the Narendra Modi regime responded with anger. An official told a newspaper that New Delhi considered it “highly objectionable”. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj raised the issue with the American envoy in
New Delhi. Although President Barack
Obama invited Modi to the US after he became the prime minister, America had earlier refused to issue a tourist or any other visato the latter after the 2002 Gujarat riots. As the German investigative magazine,
Der Spiegel, wrote in its several pieces on Snowden-NSA disclosures: “The agency can intercept huge amount of emails, text messages, and phone conversations.
The NSA even monitored the mobile telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.” The worst was that
most of the countries’ intelligence agencies, including Ger-many, actively helped the NSA to do so.
“Snowden documents also indicate that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, and its domestic intelligence agency, the Bfv, work closely with the NSA in sites around Germany,” it said.
The UK’s electronic surveillance and security agency, GCHQ, went up a step further. According to a report in The Guardian, it had its own covert operation to eavesdrop on digital data, which was set up by the NSA. Both
GCHQ and NSA shared each other’s data. Programs like Prism and Tempora, developed by these agencies, allowed them to access the systems (and social networking sites) of nine of the world’s biggest internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype. NSA acknowledged the existence of Prism, dubbed it “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses”, and claimed that the service was made available to other intelligence organizations. “Thanks to changes to US surveillance law… Prism was established in December 2007 to provide in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information about foreigners overseas,” said The Guardian.
Some of the technology firms, whose names cropped up in Prism, said that they did not allow NSA to pro-actively access data from their systems, but did comply with the US laws when asked for specific data. In a statement, after Snowden’s revelations, Google said that “it cared deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law….” It added that the company, contrary
to allegations, “does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”
Others like Apple maintained that they had no knowledge of Prism or any other NSA’s programs. However, documents prove that some of the tech companies like Microsoft may have provided NSA with unbridled access to their systems. For example, NSA claimed that “for Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption.” These services are owned by Microsoft, but the company reiterated it provided data as per the law.
NSA documents, said The Guardian, showed that it used both illegal and collaborative methods to collect private internet data. For example, it used supercomputers to break encryptions through “brute force”, and made a breakthrough in 2010. It spent $250 million to work with technology firms to “covertly influence” their product designs.
Britain GCHQ has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. However, the NSA and US administration support Prism and other programs. One of the officials said that “the program is subject to oversight by the foreign intelligence surveillance court, the (US) executive and Congress.
It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimize(s) the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally
acquired information about US persons.”
James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, claimed that these programs “are used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”
