Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden triggered a debate about the right to privacy in the Digital Age. One such debate is the balance which governments must acknowledge between the pursuit of national security and counter-terrorism over a right to privacy. Although, to quote H. Akın Ünver, "Even when conducted for national security and counterterrorism purposes, the scale and detail of mass citizen data collected, leads to rightfully pessimistic observations about individual freedoms and privacy".
Its roots can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, which later expanded to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to create the present Five Eyes alliance. The alliance developed cooperation arrangements with several "third-party" nations. Eventually, this resulted in the establishment of a global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON" (1971).
Historical background
The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s after the UKUSA Agreement was collaboratively enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, which eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network code-named "ECHELON" in 1971.
In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Sen. Frank Church, it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Decades later, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA's role in economic espionage in a report entitled 'Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information', in 1999.
However, for the general public, it was a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents in June 2013 that first revealed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Most of these were leaked by an ex-contractor, Edward Snowden. Even so, a number of these older global surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, and Tempora were referenced in the 2013 release of thousands of documents. Many countries around the world, including Western Allies and member states of NATO, have been targeted by the "Five Eyes" strategic alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States—five English-speaking Western countries aiming to achieve Total Information Awareness by mastering the Internet with analytical tools such as the Boundless Informant. As confirmed by the NSA's director Keith B. Alexander on 26 September 2013, the NSA collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens. Much of the data is kept in large storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center, a US $1.5 billion megaproject referred to by The Wall Street Journal as a "symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess."
On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an as yet unknown American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be ex-CIA and ex-NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a cache of documents to two journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Greenwald later estimated that the cache contains 15,000–20,000 documents, some very large and detailed, and some very small. In over two subsequent months of publications, it became clear that the NSA had operated a complex web of spying programs that allowed it to intercept Internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world. Specific revelations were made about China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran and Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand, however, the published documentation reveals that many of the programs indiscriminately collected bulk information directly from central servers and Internet backbones, which almost invariably carry and reroute information from distant countries.
Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlapped and interrelated with one another. These programs were often carried out with the assistance of US entities such as the United States Department of Justice and the FBI,How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages, The Guardian, 12 July 2013. Retrieved 13 July 2013. were sanctioned by US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them were signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Some of the NSA's programs were directly aided by national and foreign intelligence agencies, Britain's GCHQ and Australia's ASD, as well as by large private telecommunications and Internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra, Google, and Facebook.The first three days of revelations were: the FISC court order that Verizon provide bulk metadata to its customers to the NSA; presentation slides explaining the cooperation of nine US internet giants through the PRISM program; and the bulk collection of Chinese users' text messages, which coincided with Xi Jinping's visit to California to meet Barack Obama.
Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's surveillance activities are a continuation of news leaks which have been ongoing since the early 2000s. One year after the September 11, 2001, attacks, former U.S. intelligence official William Binney was publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens.
Further disclosures followed. On 16 December 2005, The New York Times published a report under the headline "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." In 2006, further evidence of the NSA's domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens was provided by USA Today. The newspaper released a report on 11 May 2006, regarding the NSA's "massive database" of phone records collected from "tens of millions" of U.S. citizens. According to USA Today, these phone records were provided by several telecom companies such as AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. In 2008, the security analyst Babak Pasdar revealed the existence of the so-called "Quantico circuit" that he and his team discovered in 2003 when brought on to update the carrier's security system. The circuit provided the U.S. federal government with a backdoor into the network of an unnamed wireless provider, which was later independently identified as Verizon.
Snowden's disclosures
Snowden made his first contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian in late 2012. The timeline of mass surveillance disclosures by Snowden continued throughout the entire year of 2013.
By category
Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 include court orders, memos, and policy documents related to a wide range of surveillance activities.
Purposes
According to the April 2013 summary of documents leaked by Snowden, other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs were employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries, and to gather "commercial secrets".
In a statement addressed to the National Congress of Brazil in early August 2013, journalist Glenn Greenwald maintained that the U.S. government had used counter-terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields". In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian government, Snowden wrote that "These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." According to a White House panel member, the NSA didn't stop any terrorist attack. However the NSA chief stated that surveillance programs stopped 54 terrorist plots.
In an interview with Der Spiegel published on 12 August 2013, former NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted that "We (the NSA) steal secrets. We're number one in it". Hayden also added: "We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich".
According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, these "secrets" were subsequently funneled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated.
According to the congressional testimony of Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, one of the purposes of its data collection is to store all the phone records inside a place that can be searched and assessed at all times. When asked by Senator Mark Udall if the goal of the NSA is to collect the phone records of all Americans, Alexander replied, "Yes, I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it."
Other applications of global surveillance include the identification and containment of emerging global outbreaks. In 2003, global surveillance mechanisms were used to fight against the SARs pandemic.
Targets and methods
Collection of metadata and other content
In the United States, the NSA is collecting the phone records of more than 300 million Americans. The international surveillance tool XKeyscore allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.Greenwald, Glenn (31 July 2013)."XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet' XKeyscore Gives 'Widest-Reaching' Collection of Online Data NSA Analysts Require No Prior Authorization for Searches Sweeps Up Emails, Social Media Activity and Browsing History". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 August 2013. Britain's global surveillance program Tempora intercepts the fibre-optic cables that form the backbone of the Internet. Under the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, data that has already reached its final destination would be directly harvested from the servers of the following U.S. service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple Inc.
Contact chaining
Contact chaining is a method that involves utilizing data related to social links among individuals, including call logs that connect phone numbers with each other, in order to pinpoint individuals associated with criminal groups. However, a lack of privacy guidelines can result in this process amassing an extensive portion of user data.
The NSA uses the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.
According to top secret NSA documents leaked by Snowden, during a single day in 2012, the NSA collected e-mail address books from:
33,697 Gmail accounts 82,857 Facebook accounts 105,068 Hotmail accounts 444,743 Yahoo! accounts 22,881 unspecified other providers
Each day, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts. Taken together, the data enables the NSA to draw detailed maps of a person's life based on their personal, professional, religious and political connections.
Data transfer
Federal agencies in the United States: Data gathered by these surveillance programs is routinely shared with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In addition, the NSA supplies domestic intercepts to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and other law enforcement agencies.