Thanks to government snitch Snowden, we know a little bit more about how the government uses its power and authority to “legally” eavesdrop on all its citizens in the hopes of outsmarting terrorists. Delving a bit deeper into the physical execution of these nefarious deeds, we find that both the U.S. government and the U.K. spy agencies have tapped directly into the “Internet’s backbone” undersea fiber optic cables that connect the continents. Various spy agencies have accessed this information for years, taking as much information as they needed and applying their filters to seek out what they say are certain keywords for preventing terrorist activities.
The British surveillance programs aren’t even Orwellian about their shenanigans, calling it something like “The right to privacy operation.” They instead call it “Mastering the Internet,” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation” as reported by the Guardian. How refreshing! Not that they intended those names to go public. If so, they might have called it “the patriot act.”
550 NSA and GCHQ analysts sift through our stuff daily, looking as always for some mean old Arabs who are going to blow something up. As far as possible abuses to this system where no warrants are needed to sift our data, the possibility for abuse is obvious. What can be included? The Guardian says “This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet users access to websites — all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.”
Snowden called the British take on domestic spying “worse than” the NSA, since they use a “full take system.” They put literal devices on international cables — splicing their own equipment to siphon data for their personal use. Submarines are used to attack the international lines for spying. In this, the “Five Eyes” of the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians join the U.S. and the U.K. in violating our privacy for our own good, under the premise that comfort is better than freedom.
As far as spying overseas, “the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants–latching on to those giants [underwater] switches — as long as the target of the government’s surveillance is ‘reasonably believed’ to be overseas.”
That all such invasive laws that deny the sanctity of autonomy and personal privacy must be eradicated to keep America the Land of the Free, as it has so often bragged to be, should be clear to any true patriot who thinks the Patriot Act is blasphemy. And the NSA must go.