Do you care about illegal government surveillance?

Government agencies around the world continue to run a dragnet on a large amount of communications, most of which is sent under the expectation of having a private conversation and yet the vast majority of the public seems apathetic to the issue. Why is this? Is it because of an underlying cynicism and belief that you can’t do anything to stop them? Is it because you don’t care and are using the “I have nothing to hide” argument? Do you think that it is too much work to protect yourself? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope that we can at least talk about it and maybe I can even convince you to care if you’re willing to hear me out.

First, lets take a look at what these agencies actually do. There are many to pick from such as the CIA, FBI, MI6, MI5, the NSA, GCHQ, and FSB just to name a few. Their goals are pretty much the same as far as intrusive espionage goes. They all want to gather as much data as possible in hopes of finding political dissenters and protest groups, information on powerful leaders from other governments (usually with a strong potential for blackmail) and terrorists (although they rarely ever find them). Like many tyrannical practices before them, it is done under the guise of national security. This is because people are usually willing to sacrifice their freedoms for more (perceived) security. It is important to note that these agencies do not solely operate domestically. They are global threats and their reach extends far further than you may think. Just because you live in the EU does not mean you are safe from their reach.

Does it sound like I’m exaggerating here? It can’t be that bad can it?

Well, lets look at the facts. We don’t know that much about these agencies but what we do know is absolutely terrifying. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have shown us that their technology is being used for far more than just hunting terrorists. In fact, the NSA and GCHQ have essentially been running a dragnet on the entire world. Here is an article on the GCHQ showing how they hacked the cell phones of foreign politicians attending the G20 summit in 2009. They did not discriminate, they simply tapped everybody so they could read their texts and listen in on their calls to see whats going on. Here is a similar story where the NSA collected phone calls of Verizon subscribers, only this time they weren’t looking at politicans and suspects, they were either spying on you or people like you. The more recent Vault 7 and 8 leaks showed that the CIA was engaging in similar practices such as developing tools to send information from Smart TVs. Using a code that was written and gifted to the CIA by the UK’s MI5. Even the FBI, a domestic federal police agency has been given the go ahead to hack any computer in the world. Here is some evidence of when they hacked over 8,000 computers in 120 countries using only one warrant (given by a US judge which is NOT valid in any other part of the world) during a child pornography investigation.

But they’re targeting criminals right? I have nothing to be worried about.

First of all, that is the same rhetoric being used by the Chinese Government as they continue to develop facial recognition technology (currently being used to take pictures of jaywalkers and post them on billboards), their social credit system and mandatory surveillance apps on the phones of their citizens. All in effort of building a surveillance state.

This has also not been the case historically. The two biggest enemies of the FBI in the 1960s was the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement. The former article touches on the wiretaps placed on Martin Luther King Jr by the FBI, but its also important to note that they also sent him a death threat as well. The latter link is about the program that targeted both groups. Some modern day examples include the FBI’s survellance of PETA and Greenpeace as well as the NSA and GCHQ’s probe into humanitarian groups such as UNICEF. I also encourage you to read this post written by a redditor about what it is like to live in a surveillance state.

Ever since 9/11, the motto of US intelligence agencies and many others around the world who feared the same threats was “never again”. Never again would they let an atrocity like 9/11 take place. They would do whatever it took to prevent another disaster from happening and so they introduced the PATRIOT act in congress. This 2,000 page act appeared less than a month after the attacks, and was passed with an overwhelming amount of support. As Michael Moore showed in his mockumentary film Fahrenheit 9/11, a member of congress has openly admitted to not having read the bill as well as many of his colleagues. Concerning parts of this act can be found in here.

Now lets take a quick look at what happened in 2002. DARPA created a division of US government called the Information Awareness Office, now if that sounds Orwellian than just take one look at their logo. One year later in 2003 this organization started the Total Information Awareness Program which was described as a "Manhattan Project for Counter-Terrorism". The scope of this program was massive for the time and Senator Ron Wyden called it "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States”. Sounds pretty creepy right? Yea, the American public thought so too, so DARPA responded in a brilliant stroke of genius to rename the program to Terrorism Information Awareness and suddenly nobody cared about being watched.

Okay, but I’m fine with them spying on me as long it helps them to thwart terror attacks.

Have you seen the news lately? The terror attacks that these practices are supposed to prevent still occur. There has yet to be one documented attack that has been prevented by any of these programs and I will prove to you why. During Edward Snowden’s tenure at the NSA, the Boston Marathon bombings happened.

Here we are in 2013 and the second biggest terror attack since 9/11 has occurred. Snowden watched the events unfold on the news while sitting in the NSA’s break room. He made a remark to his colleagues saying that he would bet anything that we already knew about the bombers, and that they had slipped through the cracks with nothing that could be done to stop them. Turns out he was right Russia had warned both the FBI and the CIA about the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev but when the FBI investigated they found nothing. As Snowden so eloquently put it, “when you collect everything, you understand nothing”. Not only are these practices morally wrong, they are also ineffective.

One year later in 2014, Snowden decided to leak everything. He objected to the American and British government’s warrantless surveillance and decided that the public had a right to know what was happening. Among the numerous startling documents, he revealed a program called XKEYSCORE. This program works as a sort of search engine for intelligence agencies. Analysts with access to the system will search for keywords like BOMB and PRESIDENT or DONALD TRUMP. It will then give them a list of unsecured text messages, emails, social media posts and so on. In fact just by writing this, I will likely show up among one of these searches.

Okay, so if they are targeting everybody in the name of safety and they aren’t effective at keeping everybody safe, then why the hell are they still doing it?!

One word: power. Just imagine the things you could do if you had access to everyone’s texts, emails, Facebook posts, bank records, as well as the legal and technical means to gain root access to any of the billions of devices in the world. Sounds pretty impressive right? Unfortunately for us, it all comes at our expense and without taking the proper steps, our lives are not private in the eyes of the government. After all, you wouldn't let a stranger go through your phone, so why would you let a government?

I hope this information has been helpful to those of you who are either learning about this for the first time or getting a reminder on the extent of these invasive practices. I hope that you will reconsider the repercussions of these practices and maybe take steps to protect yourself. If there is any interest then I will post a part 2 later with things you can do to minimize this data collection. Its not as hard as you might think!

For those of you who are still not convinced that governments are a threat to your personal privacy, please drop a comment below so we can get a discussion going.

By the way, anyone who is interested in their privacy is likely under heightened surveillance due to interests in anonymity and security software.