NSA Surveillance Goes Beyond Orwell’s Wildest Imagination September 24, 2013

‘All sorts of people around the world are questioning what America is doing,’ Alan Rusbridger told an audience in New York. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.
Stephen Cook: George Orwell’s dystopian book ’1984′ was a big (brother?) favourite in my family. I don’t quite know why, but my parents actually selected the numbers 1,9,8, and 4 for the final four digits of the phone number for our family home in reference to the book! (In hindsight: weird, huh?) Now Alan Rusbridger,  the editor of The Guardian, the newspaper that broke the story of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, says the depth of the NSA surveillance programs greatly exceeds anything the 1984 author could have ever imagined. Oh, and I suggest you read ‘Obama administration’ as more accurately being the ‘US government administration’.
By Dominic Rushe in New York, The Guardian – September 23, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/nxz636x
The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell’s 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday.
Speaking in the wake of a series of revelations in the Guardian about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: “Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time. This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom,” he said.
Rusbridger said the NSA stories were “clearly” not a story about totalitarianism, but that an infrastructure had been created that could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.
“Obama is a nice guy. David Cameron is a nice social Democrat. About three hours from London in Greece there are some very nasty political parties. What there is is the infrastructure for total surveillance. In history, all the precedents are unhappy,” said Rusbridger, speaking at the Advertising Week conference.
He said that whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked the documents, had been saying: “Look, wake up. You are building something that is potentially quite alarming.”
Rusbridger said that people bring their own perspectives to the NSA revelations. People who have read Kafka or Orwell found the level of surveillance scary, he said, and that those who had lived or worked in the communist eastern bloc were also concerned.
“If you are Mark Zuckerberg and you are trying to build an international business, this is dismaying to you,” Rusbridger said.
Zuckerberg recently criticised the Obama administration’s surveillance apparatus. “Frankly I think the government blew it,” he told TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
The Facebook founder was particularly damning of government claims that they were only spying on “foreigners”.
“Oh, wonderful: that’s really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies,” said Zuckerberg.
“All sorts of people around the world are questioning what America is doing,” said Rusbridger. “The president keeps saying: well we don’t spy on our people. [But] that’s not much comfort if you are German.”
Rusbridger said the world of spying had changed incomparably in the last 15 years. “The ability of these big agencies, on an international basis, to keep entire populations under some form of surveillance, and their ability to use engineering and algorithms to erect a system of monitoring and surveillance, is astonishing,” he said.
He said that as the NSA revelations had gone on, the “integrity of the internet” had been questioned. “These are big, big issues about balancing various rights in society. About how business is done. And about how safe individuals are, living their digital lives.”
The Guardian editor rebuffed criticism from the Obama administration that the newspaper was drip-feeding the stories in order to get the most from them.
“Well, the president has never worked in a newsroom,” he said.
“If there are people out there who think we have digested all this material, and [that] we have all these stories that we are going to feed out in dribs and drabs, then I think that misunderstands the nature of news. What is happening is there is a lot of material. It’s very complex material.
“These are not stories that sit up and beg to be told.”
Rusbridger said the Guardian and its partners at the New York Times and ProPublica were working through the material. “It’s a slow and patient business. If I were the president, I would welcome that.”
Meanwhile, from the land of call centres and data-entry bases comes this story:
Government employees will have to stop using Gmail and use official local servers to communicate [Getty Images]

Report Reveals Extensive Spying on India

From BRICSPost – September 24, 2013
http://thebricspost.com/report-reveals-extensive-spying-on-india/#.UkFZwqd-9D8
India is the fifth highest target of a US global communications surveillance program, classified documents handed over to The Hindu newspaper have shown.
Iran comes first in terms of aggregate data surveilled and accumulated by Washington’s National Security agency (NSA), followed by Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and India.
Citing the critical documents provided by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the September 23 edition of The Hindu revealed that two Internet and telephone monitoring programs – Boundless Informant and Prism – were used to gain access to 13.5 billion pieces of information.
The compiling of information occurs as these programs collect what is known as metadata. In simplest terms, this is data that reveals information about other data.
If two people are engaged in a cell phone (or email) conversation, the data of the caller is collected and used to reveal data about the recipient. This means that phone numbers, serial numbers, and geo-location of both the caller and recipient are collected.
In India, the leaked documents have shown, at least 6.2 billion metadata of local and overseas communications, was collected in just one month.
The Hindu says it received colour-coded ”global heat maps” which reveal the extent of NSA surveillance in key countries around the world.
“Just in March 2013, the US agency collected 6.3 billion pieces of information from the Internet network in India. Another NSA heat map shows that the American agency collected 6.2 billion pieces of information from the country’s telephone networks during the same period,” The Hindu says.
The newspaper also said that study of the leaked documents it received from Snowden, now living in Moscow, revealed that a lot of NSA surveillance centred around India’s nuclear, space, and geopolitical and economic interests.
“With the colour scheme ranging from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance), the heat maps show India in the shades of deep orange and red even as fellow BRICS nations like Brazil, Russia and China — all monitored extensively — sit in green or yellow zones,” the report showed.
While there has been no government reaction to the information revealed by the Snowden Affair, senior Indian officials have said that the NSA program was a method of counter-terrorism.
However, the Indian government has moved to ban its employees from using foreign email servers such as Gmail through Google or Yahoo Mail in a bid to protect confidential information from overseas intelligence agencies.
Some 500,000 government employees and diplomats overseas will instead have to use the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre, which is part of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology.
Other BRICS countries have taken similar measures to protect sensitive communications; Brazil is currently studying new legislation that would seek to force Google, Facebook and other internet companies to store locally gathered data inside Brazil. The new legislation would force foreign-based internet companies to maintain data centres inside Brazil that would then be governed by Brazilian privacy laws, officials said
Last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff postponed an official visit to the White House scheduled for October 23 citing revelations that the NSA was also heavily snooping on Brazilian citizens, the country’s industries and the economy.
“The illegal practices of intercepting the communications and data of citizens, companies and members of the Brazilian government constitute a serious act against national sovereignty and individual rights, and incompatible with the democratic coexistence of friendly countries,” a presidential statement said on September 17.
Rousseff has also been refocusing emphasis on completing the construction of the BRICS Cable, an underwater fibre-optic link with two endpoints in Fortaleza, Brazil and Vladivostok, Russia, and a connection from the former to Miami.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa currently use hubs in Europe and the US to connect to one another, which translates into higher costs and leaves open the opportunity for data interception and theft. Once connected, the cable would bypass the US.
The new cable, comprising 2-fibre pair 12.8 Terabit per-second capacity Fibre optic cable system, is BRICS’s greatest strategic investment for member countries and is expected to enhance technology sharing, maintain cyber-security, and boost trade and facilitate financial transactions