Still, Uncle Sam’s snooping is worrisome
Explosive media reports that have emerged over the past few days about the US Government spying on phone calls, emails, blogs and social networking sites, have understandably evoked a spirited debate on the citizen's right to privacy vis-à-vis the Government's responsibility towards ensuring national security. There is only a thin line that divides the two and even that tends to blur sometimes as the two fields overlap. Still, there is no denying that the reports have led to a widespread public perception that the Government has simply gone too far or that it is taking the US to an Orwellian world. However, for the time being, it is best to reserve judgement on this clandestine electronic surveillance programme known by its codename 'Prism'. Because, the fact remains that there is actually not much that is known about the system and that details about it are still emerging. For instance, when The Washington Post and The Guardian published their first reports last Thursday, based on Powerpoint presentations about the programme they received from a former CIA employee and IT contractor, it seemed like the Government was listening in to every phone call made, reading every email sent and scanning every blogpost that was put online. According to those initial reports, the US Government, more specifically the National Security Agency (the intelligence wing of the Department of Defence), had been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies” — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOl, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Separately, it was also reported that three major telecommunication service providers had been sharing their customers’ call logs with the Government. In the days since then, however, it has become known that the programme is more targeted in nature. According to a fact-sheet put out by the NSA, Prism only gathers “foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States”, and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 allows it to do so under “court supervision”. Add to this the Protect America Act of 2007 which lets the Government monitor internet users without a warrant if it reasonably believes such users to be ‘foreign', and there is little doubt that, popular opposition to Prism notwithstanding, the programme appears to stand on solid legal ground.
The US Government has painstakingly sought to drive home this point, as much as it has tried to make clear that Prism does not “intentionally” monitor Americans; and even when it snoops around on ‘foreign targets', it does so with the permission of a court. Be that as it may, the scope and scale of Prism still remains unclear. For instance, most of the telecommunication majors under scrutiny have denied giving the Government “direct access” to their servers. But as technology experts have pointed out, this means little since “the Government didn't need to be standing in the server rooms to get what it wanted”. The Obama Administration must come clean on the issue. While the need to protect national security interests is understandable, the argument cannot be used to muzzle debate on free speech.