Following media revelations of far-reaching electronic surveillance, the US Government has admitted to secretly collecting information on people overseas for nearly six years by tapping directly into the central servers of nine Internet giants as part of the national security push to deal with terror threats.
The web data mining comes on top of a separate seven-year internal surveillance, sweeping up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Under a top-secret order issued in April, the National Security Agency (NSA) has reportedly been collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of US telecom major, Verizon.
A top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post revealed how the NSA and the FBI have been extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs to enable analysts to track foreign targets under a secret programme, code-named PRISM.
The Internet giants, whose central servers have been tapped directly, are: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, AOl, Skype, YouTube and PalTalk. At least four of these companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple) said they had no knowledge of the PRISM programme and that they did not allow direct Government access to their servers.
Running since 2007, the PRISM programme has undergone "exponential growth" since then and has become the leading source of raw material for the NSA, The Post reported. This court-approved programme focuses on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through US servers even when sent from one overseas location to another.
The media revelations about the phone and net sweep have once again brought to the fore public concerns over privacy. The Obama administration is stoutly defending the use of these tools to neutralise terror plots and bolster national security. lawmakers have been divided on the surveillance issue, with some supporting the NSA/FBI moves and others criticising them.
Putting up a strong defence, Director of National Intelligence James R Clapper said in a statement that "information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats".
Coming down hard on the media outlets behind the revelations, Clapper said: "The unauthorised disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal programme is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans." He also spoke of numerous inaccuracies in the reports about PRISM, but did not go into details.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest defended the sweep of phone call records of tens of millions of Verizon customers in the US, calling it a "critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats".
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Uncle Sam peeping through your safety Net!
The top-secret court order issued in April to authorise the programme has helped alert US officials to possible terrorist activities, he said.
While dealing with the sharp criticism from civil rights groups, Earnest commented: "The President welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties."
"PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W Bush's secret programme of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the President to look for new authority," The Post reported, noting that the US Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunised private companies that cooperated voluntarily with US intelligence collection.
The New York Times strongly attacked the surveillance push, terming it "President Obama's dragnet". In an editorial, the paper said: "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."